Birds in the Rain
by speaks
Summary: When a routine bank robbery call goes south Raven and Beast Boy find themselves suddenly and unexpectedly at death's door. It'll be a long way home from here, and they may never get back to exactly where they were before...
1. fireflies

Rated for language, violence, and mature themes.

Set post-series, I guess, for the maturity involved. You can assume everyone is roughly 19-23yo.

Chapter one of seven (tentatively).

* * *

 **Birds in the Rain**

* * *

 _part i_ ㅡ _fireflies_

* * *

The incessant alarm was still flashing and blaring and Raven was getting royally pissed. "Would somebody shut that thing off?" she lashed out at no one in particular.

"Little busy!" Cyborg shouted back, ducking behind a marble pillar as a projectile hurtled his way. "Star, on your left!"

Star turned just in time to see Red X's grappling hook as it caught the chandelier above her and rent it from its chain with a metallic grinding sound. Glass rained and she shielded her eyes, but became tangled in the hanging prism strings and fell victim to gravity. Fortunately, the vaulted ceiling of the bank was expansive and lofty and Raven's reaction time was swift enough to stop the chandelier with her powers before it met the marble floor already littered with debris. As she watched the green bird swoop up from below to disentangle Starfire's long hair from the chandelier's lights, Raven could hear Robin snarling from somewhere behind her as he doubled the offense on Red X.

"Don't you have bigger fish to fry?" Robin growled, his words punctuated with heavy metal clangs.

"Agreed," Raven chimed. "I thought you only crawled out of your hole when someone was dangling the real Grade A worms. Isn't robbing banks for the part-time criminals?"

"Ouch," Red X laughed. "Crawled out of my hole? You wound me, sweetheart." Raven smiled sadistically as he ended the sentence with a muffled grunt that meant one of Robin's hits had finally landed.

"Tell you what." Raven jumped; Red X's voice was to her immediate left. In her surprise she lost her hold on the chandelier, leaving Starfire and Beast Boy clattering to the floor in a complicated heap of limbs and glass and gold. Robin's hand-to-hand combat training kicked in like it was conditioning and Raven's fist shot toward his nose. But Red X was quick, remarkably so, and he dodged a broken nose with a light chuckle. "I turn off the bank's alarm for you and you take back that thing you said about me crawling." He crossed his arms to deflect her next punch. "Yes or yes?"

Raven gave him a curled upper lip and a resounding "NO" just as Cyborg's arm came flying out of nowhere.

Red X flipped over backward to avoid the hit and almost lost his balanceㅡbut on the way down sent his grappling hook behind him and hit the flashing red bulb that was emitting the high pitched keening alert. It quieted with a final shrill whine, and Raven immediately felt ten shades calmer.

"How's that, sweetheart?" he called out, deflecting Robin's staff with yet another prideful, over the top backflip.

"Yeah, yeah, we know you can do backflips!" Beast Boy lauded with saccharine venom, having finally disentangled himself from Starfire and the chandelier. "Can we just skip to the part where we arrest you?"

"Sorry," Red X answered, "afraid there's been a change in plans. Scheduling conflict," he shrugged, though he was rather breathless for such nonchalant words. He successfully pulled back from Robin and Cyborg and landed on a nearby teller's desk, appraising them all from above. "I'll have my people call your people about rescheduling." He was forced to leap again to safety as Raven's powers surrounded the desk and lurched it forward toward the Titans. "Or you could just have Raven call me," Red X amended as Robin came at him again, wielding the staff with renewed vigor. "I could use the company, and plus I bet she comes cheap."

"Dude, low," Cyborg muttered as he hastily checked to see if his system had rebooted yet. He was still recovering from whatever Red X had infected him with at the start of the battle.

Raven was also no help to Robin's continued onslaught against Red X, because she was busy trying to get her tidal wave of anger under control. Did he just imply what she thought he implied? He must have because Beast Boy made a strangled choking sound and shouted from across the room. "Wow, you are _such an asshole!"_

Red X caught Robin's staff and held his other hand up to shield his mouth conspiratorially, though he made no effort to lower his voice. "Sorry, is she spoken for?" A green rhinoceros plowed into Red X's side as an answer, sending him flying painfully into the wall. "So old-fashioned," the thief grunted as he managed to slip away again. "Don't you know how to share?"

Beast Boy transformed back to human just to point angrily at Red X's back and snarl, "Fuck you!"

"Beast Boy, not helping!" Raven finally intervened, brought back from her temporary shockwave of hate by the far less awful emotion of mild annoyance.

Red X fought with Robin like it was a choreographed dance. "Want to weigh in, Boy Wonder?"

"Nothing to say," Robin seethed, focused only on trying to get close enough to knock Red X off balance. Dialogue was nothing but a distraction for himㅡa distraction Red X obviously knew all too well how to utilize, given that all the other Titans were temporarily out of action.

"Great," Beast Boy shouted, advancing on the fighting pair with every step, "cause I'm not done yet. Fuck you, you smarmy, maggot-infested toilet seat. Raven was right. You _must_ have crawled out of a hole and it was probably your own asshole. Oh, and I don't know if I mentioned this already but _fuck you!"_

Starfire gasped comically from beneath the chandelier and whispered something scalding in Tamaranean.

"Sheesh, touchy subject I guess," Red X prattled at Robin, who was still coming at him full force with his staff. "Why don't they just bang already and have done with it?"

It happened fast. Losing his cool, Robin burst out with, "Would you shut it?" and swung his staff toward Red X's side with what could have been deadly force if it had landed. But at that moment Beast Boy had lost his cool with far bigger fanfare and was lunging at Red X's back as a mountain lion, fangs bared, eyes bright like a predator in the dark. Red X heard the stomach-dropping cry of a mountain cat and instinctively turned, which on a fluke left him open to catch Robin's staff with both hands and yank it free as he turned to defend from Beast Boy's attack. From her position twenty feet away Raven saw it happen almost in slow motion, though not slowly enough to stop it. Beast Boy fell on Red X from above and Red X turned, staff in hand, bringing it up between them. A spike of horror ran Raven through and though she'd seen the worst happen she wasn't sure it was realㅡthat is, until Starfire began to scream.

Beast Boy changed back abruptly and fell to his knees in front of Red X, clutching the pole sticking out of his stomach. He looked up at the man in front of him, whose lax stance suggested shock. Like he hadn't meant to do that at all. Yeah, well, you couldn't cash _intent_ at the bank.

"Seriously," Beast Boy groaned, "fuck you."

"NO!" Robin's voice seemed throttled, and used Red X's temporary surprise to get him in a headlock. "What have you done?"

Red X seemed to have finally lost his voice. He elbowed Robin in the ribs in sudden desperation and put his foot up on Beast Boy's shoulder for leverage as he yanked the staff out with sickening cold speed. Beast Boy fell and reality came crashing down.

Raven was there first, teleporting the short distance to catch him before he hit the ground. "Don't let him get away," she choked, knowing Robin wouldn't anyway. Not after this. Beast Boy's eyes fell on her and he tried to say sorry but she couldn't hear anything over her panic. Squeezing her eyes shut she attempted to quiet the continuing sounds of battle; she had to reign in her emotions if she was going to save him.

 _ㅡ_ _get him to the tower_ , she heard, and her eyes flew open to see Cyborg leaning over them. "Don't touch him!"

"Raven, we need to act fast ifㅡ"

"Don't touch him!" she repeated, and uprooted the patch of marble beneath Cyborg's feet, sending him flat on his back as he tried to pull Beast Boy off her lap. "He's in critical condition," she explained manically, "I need toㅡ"

"He needs a hospital," Cyborg shouted.

"No time for that." It was terrifyingly true. For stomach wounds the first few minutes could mean the difference between life and death.

"This is beyond what your powers canㅡ!" Cyborg's voice was cut off as Raven broke free the rest of the floor and rose a wall of jagged marble high around her in a tight circle to block everything else out.

"He's right," Beast Boy mumbled as Raven brought her hands to his stomach, fear surging through her as she got her first real look at the gruesome wound. There was so much blood and already it was pooling beneath him, wetting her knees. "'s pretty bad this time. Lucky shot..."

Right. Lucky. "It's not beyond me," she argued, channeling all her power into the process of healing. But as soon as she got a sense for the depth of the wound she knew she was wrong, and could tell with cold certainty that she did not have enough strength left over from the battle to mend this. "I can fix this."

To her surprise Beast Boy laughed. It was a rattly, wet laugh, and Raven tore her eyes from his stomach to find that he actually was smiling. "You're a terrible liar."

"Shut up," she scolded, then caught her mistake when his mouth snapped shut. She clarified. "You're making it worse by talking."

"I don't think it gets worse than this." His tone had grown solemn and Raven's attention was once again snapped from her work. He was looking up, past her toward the faraway ceiling, the white circle of light at the top of the deep marble well Raven had erected around them, blinking with unfocused eyes. His lips twitched downward as he told her, "I think… I think I'm dying, Rae."

"You're not dying." Raven switched tactics, abandoning the true healing process and moving toward closing up the wound first before he lost any more precious blood. He gasped and clutched at the edge of her cloak, his back arching away from the ground. "I know it hurts," she soothed. Her powers were probably making him feel even worse as they clumsily attempted to reattach muscle fibers and close the tear; Raven had to struggle to stay upright as he pulled on the fabric, blinded by pain.

Finally she realized he wasn't just clinging to her blindly, he was tugging insistently at her cloak like a lost child. Focus broken again, she tore her eyes from his wound. Having gotten her attention, he relaxed somewhat, collapsing back to the floor. "I have to tell you something," he blurted.

"I'm trying to heal you." Raven's voice cracked under the pressure. She was having difficulty even closing up his wound with all this talking. "Please… please stop."

"It's important," he pressed. "I'm sorry. For... I dunno. Everything. Bothering you. All the time. I just..."

"Forㅡ" Raven paused. It seemed such a trivial thing given the circumstances. "For what?"

"I want to make you happy," he whispered. "I just... don't know how."

Raven's stomach dropped as his hand went slack and fell from her cloak, and she blurted out "Don't go!" before she realized he was only too tired to hold his arm up. A small part of her was embarrassed at how poorly she was handling this, but in the forefront was her fear. Fear was definitely at the reigns right now. "I am happy," she followed quickly, hoping to keep him interested and awake as she redoubled her efforts. The wound had mostly clotted but he'd lost far too much blood. Two fingers to his neck told her his heart was pumping fast, which only meant he'd lose more. "I might not show it well but I'm happier these days than I've been in my whole life."

Beast Boy coughed, and Raven blanched as she realized his mouth had filled with blood. "Could you do me a favor?"

"Does it involve healing you? Because I'm trying."

Beast Boy started to laugh, but it changed to a whimper. "Don't make me laugh," he complained. "It hurts. I meant… Would you tell Cyborg he can have all my stuff?"

"Beast Boyㅡ"

"And make sure Robin gets over the chip on his shoulder," he spluttered. "If he doesn't give it a go with Starfire I'm gonna haunt him so much."

"I don't think I canㅡ"

"Tell Starfire… Be nice to her. Tell her not to cry. I hate making her cry."

"Beast Boy, don't do this," she begged.

"I have one for you too," he went on softly, ignoring her. "Only I don't know how to say it. Not very good with words…"

Tears pricked her eyes and the marble wall around them shook as she struggled to keep ahold of herself. "What?"

"Could you.. um…"

"What?"

Beast Boy averted his eyes, each breath shallower than the last. It took a long moment for her to realize he was embarrassed. "Can you just read my emotions? It'll be quicker, anyway. It'll be enough."

"You _want_ me to do that?" It was a power Raven mostly used on villains because she didn't believe in using it without consent unless absolutely necessary. And here he was, asking. Never before had anyone _asked_ her to look into their emotions.

"Yeah," he encouraged. "Only… hang on."

He fought an internal battle for a moment until he could force himself to meet her eyes again and then slowly, painstakingly, removed one blood-covered glove from his hand and brought it up to the side of her face. Tentatively, like he was reaching toward a live wire, he brushed away her hair and placed his hand there. Despite everything it was warm. She was in no state of mind to do anything about this development other than to freeze, becoming as still as immovable bedrock beneath a current. Assured he wasn't going to be flung away, Beast Boy spread his fingers out more and brushed his thumb across a stray tear which Raven had no memory of shedding.

"Okay," he said evenly. "Go."

Unable to deny him what was essentially his dying wish, Raven diverted the smallest bit of energy away from his wound and toward his head. She brushed on the outside of his psyche and felt virtually no resistance as she plunged into the pool there and was submerged instantly in the froth of emotion.

First there was warmth. Sunrays and lamplight and laughter andㅡthe random memory swirls blossomed into emotions Raven could finally recognize: affection, mischief, happiness. Beast Boy breathed heavily under her hands, but she could barely see him beneath the barrage of mental images that poured from him. The pool swiftly morphed from coals into a raging fire and Raven no longer had names for all of the feelings, for they were too multifaceted. Affection exploded into something fiercer, some kind of neutron star she had to look away from for fear of going blind. Mischief plunged down into a dark cavern where it became something that set Raven's heart hammering with strange anticipation. Happiness split, becoming both unbridled elation and crippling sorrow.

Raven gasped as the sorrow consumed her and all she could feel was the harrowing pangs of deepest regret; how much of it was his and how much was her own she would never know. She pulled back sharply and found herself in the bank again, gasping for air.

The makeshift wall of marble was gone, churning around them instead in a black tornado of rubble. As she came to her senses the whirling marble fell, each broken piece echoing up to the ceiling and back. Raven was so overcome that she didn't notice any of their friends closing in around them, offering guidance, offering assistance. They were far beyond assistance. Raven placed both her hands back on Beast Boy's stomach and resorted to muttering her mantra under her breath.

Beast Boy's hand left her face, searching, his fingers angling as if to touch something that wasn't there. " _Umeme mende_ ," he told her, rapt with wonder. "There's fireflies here." A smile touched his lips. "Haven't seen these since the forest in Congo…" He trailed off and coughed, a spray of blood dripping off his stray fang onto his lip. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and then looked at his hand like he'd never seen the color red before.

Raven caught his hand before he could deduce what he was looking at and squeezed it hard. "Look at me," she commanded, and he did, though she wasn't sure he was really seeing her. "Tell me more about the rainforest. What else was there?"

"You have... flowers," he mumbled incomprehensibly, "in your eyes."

His eyelids fluttered shut and Raven's entire body hitched forward. "Focus, Garfield!"

Hearing his real name jarred him awake, enough to gaze at her glassily and mumble some more. "My parents had them too. I told them I'd be right back…" Beast Boy's hand was now dead weight in hers but she held onto it nonetheless.

"Maybe you should say it with me," she despaired. "Azarath.. metrion.. zinthos."

On Raven's next iteration he started to speak with her but she paused when she realized he wasn't repeating her mantra at all. "Kupendwa," he said again, slower, as if by speaking more slowly he could make her understand, stumbling over his words in an almost sing-song way, taking short shallow breaths. "Aliruka kupitia mvua... kumwambia... kupendwa."

"Garfield!" she goaded. "Azarath, metrion, zinthos!"

Beast Boy's fingers curled around hers as he tried to repeat the right syllables, his voice barely audible. "Azuka.. metrion.. zinthos."

A wild thought occurred to her then. An idea. A desperate idea.

"Azarath.. metrion.. zinthos," she encouraged him, clutching his hand like she was hanging onto a kite string in a hurricane. He might be on the brink but he wasn't down for the count, not if she had one crazy trick left up her sleeve. "Azarath.. metrion.. zinthos." _Clear your mind,_ she urged herself, and closed her eyes to help the process. She only hoped Beast Boy could manage to clear his as well. "Azarath.. metrion.. zinthos." His voice was slurred and subdued, like he was sleep-talking. The sound of this was the last thing on Raven's mind as she descended deep toward a meditative trance, and the sound of hers was the last thing on his as he was pulled down after her. He was fully prepared for her familiar sacred mantra to be the last thing he ever heard as he mumbled along with one final "zinthos" before following Raven headfirst into the yawning jaws of darkness.

* * *

 _continue in part ii . . ._

* * *

I would normally include a translation here of the Swahili used but it's actually very relevant to the plot like so I won't translate it until later. Of course I can't stop you from looking it up but let's just say it won't make any sense till later anyway.

(And no, the entire story won't be as horrifying as this chapter, don't worry!)


	2. cityscape

.

Note: I've always been notoriously bad at responding to reviews but please know that I ALWAYS read them and am appreciative of every single one. xo

* * *

 _part ii_ _ㅡ_ _cityscape_

* * *

The sky was different.

Raven sat in the lotus position on a familiar rock formation, its slopes all jutted with craters and ancient layers of sediment. It wasn't truly ancient though, which she knew. It was only as old as she was. Frowning, she noticed that her skyㅡnormally bloodredㅡwas changing still, fading to deep navy near the zenith while at the horizon bright pinks and yellows lit the clouds from beyond the vanishing point. Clouds. Imagine that. There weren't usually clouds here in her mindscape.

Everything about this was fishy. As she trekked down the pathway in her mind she couldn't quell the sense that something was terribly wrong. Try as she might, she couldn't remember how she had come to be here. Did she need something? Why had she come? Her emotional personifications might have helped her figure it out but they were all alarmingly absent. Searching every corner and crevice turned up nothing and nobody. Raven was alone.

Except she wasn't quite.

As she came around a bend in the path the ground dipped in a place it never had before and, startled, Raven found herself standing ankle-deep in clear water. A pond? Enthralled, she bent toward it, marvelling at her reflection in the still surface, until... Movement. A green fish flashed in and out of view, wetting her as it grazed the surface.

Instinctively she lunged after it, splashing into the current. A dolphin rocketed out of the river. Water sprayed upward and stretched into swaying strands of yellow grass that tickled Raven's arms and legs, and the dolphin was gone; instead there was a buck that shook the drips from its antlers as it disappeared into the flora. Raven spun. She was lost. What had she come here for again? Thickly trunked trees littered the plain, few and far, and in the distance tall skyscrapers glittered in the dying light. The sun was setting, she understood. The last of the light refracted off the familiar skyline, lighting it up: platinum, purple, and gold.

She plucked the longest blade of grass and brought it close for examination, but a crow greener than any of the grass flew up from some hidden place and tried to snatch it away. Raven wrenched it back. The crow played tug o' war, flapping madly, stirring the ocean of grass until every part of her skin was stinging, but still she held on.

"Niachie!"

Raven's eyes snapped open. She was standing on a narrow dock, weathered and worn, clutching a rope in her hands which led down the wooden planks to a one-man rowboat. Beast Boy stood in the center of the boat, propping himself up on an oar and staring at her. "Please?"

"No," she replied, not quite sure what he'd initially asked but sensing that this was her answer.

"I told them I'd be right back," he said, and dipped his oar into the river. Ripples rose into the air impossibly and pixelated until they glitched out of existence. "You have to let me go."

"We're in my world," Raven countered, suddenly remembering that fact. "You can't tell me what to do here, Beast Boy." She yanked on the rope and the boat lurched, unbalancing him.

He steadied himself by placing the oar on the surface of the dock and then looked at the ripples, frustrated. "You don't know what you're talking about. That's not where we are." Something in the river caught his attention and his countenance brightened. A wind picked up, whistling through the reeds, urging Raven onto the decaying deck. "Hey, check it out! Umeme mende!"

When he said that Raven's stomach dropped, though she didn't know why. She didn't even know what the words meant. "Umeme mende?"

Beast Boy dropped into a crouch, peering intently over the edge of the boat. "Fireflies. Look, Rae!"

Tentatively she released the rope and stepped into the boat, trying to see what he was seeing. Beneath the water lights darted back and forth, spiralling downward in an erratic dance. Together they leaned closer and closer until their noses broke the surface and they were suddenly looking up at the stars. The ledge of the Tower's roof was under them and their legs dangled freely over the side, the waves washing softly onto the shore far below. Disoriented, Raven drew her legs up and crossed them, surveying the bridge that led across the bay to connect the museum district with the business district. Night was upon them and the streetlights were coming on now in the distance. One by one. Tiny pinpricks of light.

"This is my favorite place," Beast Boy said on her left.

"The roof?" she wondered defensively; the roof was _her_ favorite place.

He looked at her strangely, his eyes crinkled at the edges. "No."

"I don't understand."

"I know," he sighed, taking her hand. "Me neither."

That answer wasn't good enough. "I don't _understand_ , Beast Boy."

"Raven?"

"I don't understand…"

"Raven, calm downㅡ"

"I'm calm," she countered, though it was a lie. "I'm fine." She lowered her head to block out the view of the lights in the bay, hiding beneath her hood. "Leave me alone."

Hands on her shoulders. "Raven, it's just me. It's okay."

"I don't understand!"

"I know," he sighed, compressing his fingers gently on her shoulders. "Me neither."

Raven took a deep, shaky breath and looked up into Robin's face. Wait. "Robin? But..."

Robin almost fell over. "Raven? Can you hear me now? Are you awake?"

"I wasn't sleeping," she answered testily. "I was…" She became aware of the heavy weight on her lap and, like whiplash, the memory of what had recently transpired wrung her neck. Robin's cape was consumed by black energy and he barely had time to protest before he was thrown bodily from Raven and Beast Boy.

"How long has it been?" she demanded, afraid to even look at the boy on her lap. She could feel his chest rising and falling so at least he was alive, but he was unconscious.

Starfire descended from above to pluck Robin out of a pile of rubble, who looked rather offended. "You have been meditating for nearly an hour," Starfire worried. "It is over now, yes? You have mended friend Beast Boy?"

Raven shook her head, gently lowering Beast Boy to the floor so she could stand. "We're not out of the woods yet. He's lost far too much blood. He needs a transfusion."

"Make way," Cyborg shouted, and Raven turned to see him ushering a team of paramedics through the bank lobby.

"No," Raven said before they got halfway across the room. "No stretchers, my powers are far more stable."

"But do you have sufficient energy toㅡ?"

Raven cut Starfire off with the sound of marble splitting yet again, though this time it was the marble directly beneath Beast Boy's prone body. "I'm fine," she said, following him out of the bank into the dying sunset. "Let's go home."

The flight back to the tower was the longest of her life. Already the sky was darkening but she still had to squint against the light, which made her head ache all the way to the base of her neck. As the lights on the bridge began to blink on she was struck with deja vu. She'd told Robin she hadn't been sleeping, but it had felt more like sleep than anything else. The skyscrapers of Jump City had stood silhouetted against the skyline at dusk, much the same as they looked now. Platinum. Purple. Gold. Beast Boy had been there. That much she knew.

At some point Starfire might have been holding her upright, but she wasn't sure. They say a person can exhibit extreme strength under the influence of an adrenaline rush, and Raven could only assume that's what kept her from collapsing in an exhausted heap. By the time they entered the med bay all of her limbs were numb and there was a persistent ringing in her ears.

From there Cyborg finally took over, flicking bits of rubble off the cot as he hooked Beast Boy up to various wires and tubes Raven couldn't begin to know the function of. Something wet touched her cheek and for a confusing moment she thought she was crying again, but then she registered Starfire's hair tickling her knees and realized Star was kneeling in front of her, wiping her face with a wet cloth.

"That's not necessary," Raven reacted, shying away from the touch.

Starfire pulled back reluctantly and Raven saw that the white cloth had stained pink. "But I am not done yet…"

"Later, Star." Robin's voice came from the chair on Raven's right. Refusing to look at him, Raven instead watched him fidget through her peripherals. "Raven, what exactly… What happened?"

Raven didn't deign to answer that vague question until Cyborg piped up from the bedside. "He means to say: what the heck did you _do?_ We thought B was..." He trailed off and turned to face her, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

"So did I," Raven mumbled. "He and I… I suppose you could call it a shared healing state. I can heal myself faster than I can heal others because I'm able to enter a deeper meditative trance to heal myself, as you're all aware. In the past I've read about successful cases of shared trances…"

"Hang up, you pulled that crazy stunt on a _whim?_ Off something you read?"

Raven watched Cyborg work from behind, and though she couldn't tell what he meant by that she was calmed by the sense of purpose that always fell on his shoulders like a cape in the med bay. Not for the first time, she wondered if he was pursuing the wrong line of work. "Yes."

"Nice work, Raven." Robin laid his hand on her shoulder compassionately and she didn't have the energy to shrug away.

Starfire took that as her golden ticket and scooted up intimately close to Raven on the other side. "Dear friend, I did not realize your healing powers were so advanced. You have made the impression on me today."

Raven shook her head. Between the two of them she was struck with intense claustrophobia. "They're not that advanced. I had to… I couldn't heal him. I had to bring our mindscapes together so I could heal _myself_. I wasn't even sure it would work; it was a shot in the dark."

"Crazy." Cyborg whistled. "Crazy. Good call, Rave. And hey, stop worrying." His tone grew light and he ruffled Beast Boy's matted hair with affection. "He's gonna be fine, you know."

Raven nodded, though the motion was hollow and unfelt. "I need to meditate."

"Why don't you head upstairs?" Robin suggested. "You look…"

"Most horrible," Starfire helped.

"You look tired," Robin amended. "We can handle it from here."

Tired was the wrong word. She felt exhaustion all the way down to her bone marrow. "I think I should stay here in case I'm needed." No one could sway her and soon she was chanting her mantra, unable to hear them.

.

.

Seven hours later when Beast Boy awoke she was still muttering softly in the same spot. He watched her blearily for a moment, unable to determine where he was, or when he was for that matter. There were bright florescent lights. He was lying on something soft and warm. Nothing hurtㅡin fact the was a light fluttery sensation all throughout his extremities. He'd been having the worst nightmare, followed by the weirdest dream.

"Is this real?" he wondered aloud, prompting Cyborg to wheel around, dropping his clipboard and barely saving his cup of coffee.

"Yo," he spoke into the communicator, "he's awake, guys!" Then he approached the bedside, clapping Beast Boy's shoulder and beaming. "Course it's real, B, and I hope you know you scared the hell out of us. You are one lucky son of a gun."

Great. So that hadn't been a dream, then. With painstaking slowness, pale with the memory of the last time he'd looked at it, he pulled the white sheet down to reveal his stomach. His chest was bare beneath the sheet, smooth and unbroken, yet marred with an ugly scar. Ragged skin and pain and blood flooded his mind and he cringed hard, shaking his head to rid the thoughts. He brushed one hand across his stomach in disbelief.

"You okay, B?"

"Sure, I…" he trailed off, his eyes falling on Raven yet again. On one of the clinical metal chairs by the door she sat with her legs crossed, repeating her mantra under her breath. The sight was reassuring and also puzzlingㅡhe'd never seen her meditate without levitating before. There was blood on her cheek and he almost lunged out of bed before he remembered that it wasn't hers, it was his.

When he recognized the odd shape as a handprint he almost needed a defibrillator.

"Woah, relax," Cyborg soothed, hastily fussing with the tubes extending from Beast Boy's arm as the steady beeping from the monitor turned erratic. "We just barely got you in working order; don't go having a heart attack on me."

"Raven saved me." He looked at Cyborg pointedly, questioning him without phrasing the question.

Cyborg's only answer was a slightly raised eyebrow. "I think I'm gonna rouse her, now that you're up. Crazy girl hasn't left that chair even once."

But the next thing to happen was Starfire falling on Beast Boy with a crushing hug before he'd even seen her enter the room. "Lungs," he choked, looking to Robin for assistance, who'd slipped in after her.

"It's a relief to see you up," Robin smiled.

Raven exited her trance abruptly when Cyborg nudged her and Cy's coffee mug cracked down the middle. Starfire fussed about, wiping it up while Cy frantically tried to air out his arm before the hot liquid found its way into the seams, and between their jostling motions Raven finally saw Beast Boy sitting up in bed. Her lips parted in surprise. "You're awake."

Beast Boy's heart launched into gymnastics as his brain tried to replay everything he had said to her at the bank, and the things he hadn't said. He ripped the heart monitor from his fingertip and stuffed it under the sheet, ignoring Cyborg's sidelong glance as the output flatlined. "You look tired," he offered.

"She's been up all night meditating," Cyborg said, dabbing at his arm with a clean towel. "Now that he's awake would you please get some shut eye?" he demanded of her.

"I don't think it's wise," Raven said slowly, refusing to meet anyone's eyes. "I still might be needed."

"Raven, you can't justㅡ"

Beast Boy cleared his throat and everyone looked at him. He blushed under their stares, wondering exactly how much they had seen of the fiasco at the bank. "Why don't you just sleep down here?" he suggested as benignly as possible. "You know, just in case. There's an empty cot with your name on it." With a crooked smile he gestured to the bed on his other side, still folded with fresh blankets.

If he wasn't mistaken she looked positively relieved at the suggestion. "Fine," she breathed. "Alright."

Cyborg accepted this and hastened to shoo Star and Rob from the room. "Everyone out so Raven can sleep! I'll check in on you in a bit, BB," he whispered as he flicked off the light and began to close the door behind him. " _Please_ let Raven rest. Oh and… put that pulse oximeter back on your finger or I'll mix ground hamburger into the saline in your IV." Beast Boy pulled a face but did as he was asked.

Raven was unconscious before the door had clicked shut, passed out on top of the folded sheets with her back to the rest of the room, her cloak falling off the near side of the bed and hair sprawled across the pillow.

Beast Boy waited until the hall light switched off beneath the crack of the door before he swung his legs off the side of his hospital bed, fighting with himself. He wanted to talk to her. He wanted to wake her. To thank her, to hug her, to wipe the blood off her face, to apologize for making a total ass out of himself, to _something._ He dragged his hand through his hair in exasperation, desperate for closure of any kind. He was such an idiot! He'd thought he was about to die so he'd put his hand on her face and summoned every feeling he'd ever felt about her all at once and she had _felt that_ andㅡoh, he'd messed up, he'd really messed up this timeㅡ

Beast Boy almost fell off the bed when the painted window on the door to the hall splintered, a few stray chips tinkling onto the tile floor. He let out an unbecoming yelp and tried to calm his heart, knowing Cyborg would be monitoring it wirelessly.

"Raven?" he whispered into the dark. That was her, right? Was she awake after all? When there was no answer he eased off the bed, wincing at the deep throb in his gut as he moved toward the second cot. "Hey… are you okay?"

The bed springs creaked as he leaned over her only to realize she was indeed still fast asleep.

Beast Boy couldn't help the tired frown that broke over him. _Must be some nightmare._ Had he known a bit more about the science behind the sleep process he would have realized that Raven had not yet been asleep long enough to enter a REM state, and thus could not possibly have been dreaming.

* * *

 _continue in part iii . . ._


	3. lava lamp

.

This chapter's a bit long compared to the previous two. I'm guessing there's not gonna be a real standard chapter length in this story.

* * *

 _part iii ㅡ lava lamp_

* * *

The medbay was empty. Raven knew this the instant she woke upㅡnot in the intuitive sense but in a very physical sense. The singular _aloneness_ smacked her as she regained consciousness and she sat up in bed with a start, scanning the med bay for signs of life.

The cot next to hers that should have harbored somebody green had instead been vacated while she slept. The pillow was fluffed and fresh folded sheets had been laid atop the mattress. It was as if no one had ever been there.

Static interrupted the placid display on the monitor next to the bed and the sound of white noise filled the room. Numbly Raven dropped down from the cot to the floor. Beast Boy was gone? All that betrayed his recent stay here was a red smear on the floor that had been missed by whoever cleaned the room and as she stepped over it nausea gripped her, reaching out through her powers to hurl the fresh linens from the abandoned hospital bed. Everything she'd done to save him hadn't been enough. _She slept right through it, too._ The monitor feed went dark with an electric sizzle and the cabinets flew open, the stacks of bottles inside them popping one by one. With each pop Raven curled further and further in on herself, numb to the wanton destruction her powers wreaked on the medical bay until finally a shout cut through her emotional torrent.

Raven peeked through her hair as papers flapped between them, lifeless as they fluttered in shreds to the floor. Cyborg was shaking her shoulders. "Raven, calm down! Everything is fine!"

Raven wanted to choke him. Nothing would ever be fine again. Her gaze gravitated toward the empty bed as she struggled to regain control of herself and to her confoundment Cyborg laughed.

"Raven, B is _fine_. He's upstairs right now. We discharged him hours ago while you were still passed out. Everything is a-ok."

The papers quieted for good. "Oh," she said. The sound of settling glass faded from the edges of the room. "You… discharged him?" She'd be lying if she said she'd ever been more relieved than she was in this moment. Plus, she felt nothing short of stupid. Of course they wouldn't have let her go on sleeping if the case had been different. Stupid. When had she ever jumped to such rash conclusions?

"Yep," Cyborg grinned. "He's right as rain, thanks to you. I was just coming down here to discharge you too when your heart monitor went freakin nutso."

"Heart monitor?"

Cyborg grabbed her wrist gently and pulled the little oximeter from her pointer finger. Raven ogled it. She hadn't even noticed it there. "For good measure," Cyborg explained. "We thought you seemed a bit stressed when you went to sleep."

"Well I'm fine now," she said coldly, feeling overexposed. "Everyone made out alright and Red X is in custody. There's nothing left to stress over."

Cyborg took a hesitant step back and rubbed at the back of his neck. "About that, Rave."

Raven bristled. "Don't tell me."

"You know how fast the guy is," Cyborg defended, "and the only one who went in pursuit after he fled was Robin. I was trying to help you guys and Star was still trapped. Robin was so motivated he probably would have caught him no-contest, butㅡ"

"But _what?_ " After she'd begged him, too. Raven didn't beg, but she had begged Robin last night not to let Red X escape after what he'd done. And what did Robin do? "How could he have let this happen?"

" _But_ ," Cyborg continued, growing impatient with Raven's hostility, "Robin thought he should be there. With us. With BB," he clarified with increased transparency. "In case heㅡyou know."

Slightly humbled at this new perspective, Raven backed down. She hadn't thought of it that way. "I suppose that was the right thing to do."

Cyborg leaned in with a furtive eye on the door to the hall. "Besides, between you and me, I'm a little afraid of what Robin might've done to him if he'd caught him."

"Well I'm sure he'll have another chance. I'm assuming he's already continuing the search?"

"He and Star are out on patrol as we speak," Cyborg affirmed. "You wanna join them?"

Raven opened her mouth to accept but faltered. She took a long look at the sorry state of the medical bay and willed Wisdom to temper Wrath and Pride. "No, I…" Pride backed down. "I think I might still be in need of some meditation."

Cyborg was, as always, supportive. "I hear ya. You ready to check out, then?"

"It was just a nap. I'm not signing any paperwork," she grumbled.

"Come on, not you too," he complained as she turned her nose up at the clipboard he was waggling in her direction. She stepped over the broken glass into the corridor, ignoring his loud rant about superheroes never following protocol.

.

.

Beast Boy clicked from one article to the next with one eye open, then switched to the other eye, tapping his finger on the mouse. He'd had the same tabs open for two hours now and hadn't gleaned anything from these angled news articles that he didn't already know. They'd been over all of this and more in the past month on the manhunt for Red Xㅡall except the newest story that had hit headlines at sundown last night and which was now wallpapered on every news site. _String of Thefts Continues._ On another site they declared: _Red X Robs City Bank, Escapes._ The others were more callous. _Titan Stabbed in Bank Heist.  Bloodshed at J. City Bank._ Or, by far the winner of the lot (and in the New York Times, to boot!): _Is Beast Boy Dead?_

Any other day and he might've bust a lung in triumph at making headlines in a publication like the Times, but not today. He'd already had several hysterical calls from friends and colleagues about it, the worst of which came from his adoptive mother early this morning. When he answered her video call waving sheepishly in sweatpants and a t-shirt she had burst into tears. Man, that sucked. Freaking journalists...

Pushing his chair away from the desk with a groan, he swiveled towards the window. The sky was sapphire and cloudless and a seagull landed on the sill outside to peck at an old empty sparrow's nest before moving on. Lucky bird. Beast Boy would much rather be out on patrol with Rob and Star right now, looking for the dick who gutted him. He was gunning for some sweet, sweet, razortooth velociraptor-style revenge. But Robin probably knew that, cause Robin _always_ knew, and that was probably half the reason Beast Boy was consigned to house arrest.

The other half of the reasonㅡwell, it made itself known as Beast Boy tried to stretch in his chair and felt a stinging twist deep in his stomach. "Ow," he complained aloud.

He temporarily abandoned his place at the desk and the attempt to unravel the mystery behind Red X's latest batch of confounding crimes. Research duty had always been more Robin and Cyborg's thing anyway. Mostly Robin. Beast Boy didn't have the attention span required for this. He was gonna go stir crazy if Robin kept him cooped up in the tower for any longer than 24 hours; seriously, 12 more hours of this and he was going out on patrol with them whether they liked it or not. When someone knocked on the door he was in the middle of raising the window to breath in some of the brisk ocean air. He wasn't sure which soundㅡthe squeak or the knockㅡscared off the seagull, who'd returned to check out that old nest again. Rolling his eyes Beast Boy shuffled his way to the door.

"I told you, Cy, I am fine! If I spontaneously catch on fire though I'll be sure toㅡOh." When the door hissed open Beast Boy's mouth snapped shut so hard his teeth clacked together. It wasn't Cyborg who'd knocked, it was Raven.

"Very funny," she said, though any fool with a brain could tell what she really meant was 'as funny as a funeral.'

"Hey, uh… Hi," he finished lamely. _Oh man,_ he thought, _here it comes_. _She's going to ask me what the blitz I was thinking when I put my hand on her._ Maybe she already figured it out. Maybe she was just finding the right words to let him down gently. Hell, it was Raven, she was probably summoning the energy right now to throw him through the open window. Just because she'd been distraught at the bank didn't mean anything had changed between them in the aftermath. Right?

"Could I come in for a minute?"

Okay, maybe he was wrong. At least a little wrong. So far. "Yeah, sure. Okay."

The door hissed shut again behind her and Beast Boy hastily kicked away a few dated comic books to clear a path. She didn't seem to notice. In fact she didn't seem to notice any of the mess, which surprised him somewhat since she'd always avoided coming in here because (quote unquote) 'the clutter gave her anxiety.'

Her eyes fell on the open window and Beast Boy wondered if she was purposely avoiding looking at him. The thought curdled what was left of his breakfast in his stomach. After all, he was still dwelling on what Starfire had told him when she'd visited his bedroom to bestow on him a thousand hugs before leaving with Robin, and a few extra words that Cy and Rob had somehow so carefully neglected to mention. The hail mary Raven had fallen back on to heal him. Starfire had blushed as she hurriedly explained, citing that _"I feel justified in sharing this because you should have the knowledge of how true a friend Raven is."_ Just remembering the conversation Beast Boy felt his heartbeat quickening. The way Star shied away from the topic had made it sound profoundly intimate.

Beast Boy anxiously shifted his weight back and forth, wondering if Raven regretted giving him so much of herself. Right when he was certain the silence was going to kill him for real she finally spoke, directing her question to the open window. "Are you okay?"

He leapt on that, grateful for a reprieve from his circular thoughts. "I guess. Cy says I'm totally healed up, good as new." The ache was starting to get to him so he settled into his desk chair as nonchalantly as he could manage. "You know, I always wonderedㅡback when we filled out all that boring paperwork right when the five of us fell in togetherㅡwhy Cy wanted to know our blood types. I thought it was excessive."

A salty gust of air tossed Raven's hair and the fabric of her cloak. Tugging her hood off, Raven admitted, "I thought so too. I suppose we now know why."

"I tend to learn things the hard way. Hey, I can close the window if the wind is bothering you," he offered. This was the longest she'd ever hung out in his room before; the last thing he wanted was to unwittingly push her away.

Raven declined. "No, it's refreshing. What are you reading?"

Beast Boy drummed his fingers on his leg, thrown by the casualty of the conversation. Compared to the ordeal at the bank this was just plain strange. "Latest batch of articles. Robin wouldn't let me go on patrol and suggested I play Sherlock instead."

"And?"

She was still facing the window. If he didn't know her better he'd be outright offended. Even when he'd nearly _died_ he couldn't get her full attention! But... he knew from more than five years of experience with Raven that things were almost never what they appeared on the surface level. There was a reason she'd come here.

"Nada," he said. "Zilch. Nothing about Red X we didn't see firsthand. Lots of journalists announcing my tragic untimely death; that part's been a real blast." He exited out of all gazillion open tabs as he named them off. "A lot of second page stuff rambling about the history of J. City Bank. History of Red X's crimes. Again, old news. Lots of tabloid crap, too." Swiveling toward her with a characteristic smirk, he listed the best one. "Some teller that was there at the bank before we evacuated everyone has been insisting to any reporter who will listen that Red X has been sending her texts since the robbery. Can you believe this nonsense?"

Raven shrugged. "Some people just want attention."

"Whatever you say, Rae." Beast Boy finished the thought with a yawn and an ungainly stretch to match, but his arms were only half raised when he flinched and sucked in sharply. Damn, he kept forgetting about that.

"What was that?" Beast Boy jerked upright at the wariness of her tone, and realized she was finally looking at him. Right at him. "I thought Cyborg said you were completely healed?"

"Well, yeah."

"You don't sound healed."

"It's just a little ache, it'll go away. It's fine." To exemplify his fineness he rose from the comfy haven of the computer chair, bouncing a bit on the balls of his feet.

"Beast Boy." Her voice hovered halfway between threat and concern. "Swallow your pride and let me finish healing you."

"Seriously, you don't have to…" he trailed off, unsure what to make of her determination as she crossed the room. In the end he just stood there as she held her hand a few inches away from his stomach and closed her eyes, muttering under her breath.

After a short moment she lowered her arm, frowning up at him. After all this time he still hadn't quite grown accustomed to being taller than her; it wasn't often that she stood so near to him that he got to look down into her face. She spoke like she was carefully measuring the weight of each word. "There's nothing left for me to heal."

Beast Boy blew a stray strand of hair up away from his eye, feeling somewhat mortified. "Like I said, Cy says I'm good. He thinks the lingering pain might be psychological," he tacked on quickly, hoping to gloss right on over that part.

Unfortunately that was a no-can-do. Raven's frown deepened and her hands went to her hips. "Psychological? Cyborg said that?"

"Aaand he said it'll probably go away on its own."

Her eyebrows furrowed as she thought this over. She'd never looked so unsure. "I'm not convinced. Would you mind if I looked at it more closely?"

"I'll need to see your qualifications, doctor," he joked, kicking himself even as the words left his mouth. "Kidding!" he hastened as she narrowed her eyes defensively. "Here." He lifted his secondhand Star Trek tee to show her the grisly scar Red X had gifted him with. The window slammed down with a sharp crack and they both jumped.

"Sorry," Raven muttered. "I just, um…"

Beast Boy let his shirt fall. She was back to looking at the window anyway. Her unusually tense posture struck him then and he had to ask, "Raven, are _you_ okay?"

That snapped her out of whatever reverie she had backed into. "Show me again." When Beast Boy wrinkled his nose at her she stood her ground. "We need to be completely sure you've healed properly or any number of problems could arise. You could be bleeding internally or you could become septic orㅡ"

"Yeah, yeah, I get it."

Up went the shirt again. This time nothing slammed or broke, but her lips pressed into a thin line as she reached toward the shiny purple scar tissue. Black energy prickled along her arm as she rechecked the damage and Beast Boy chose to focus on that alone.

"It doesn't make any sense," she murmured. "You should be healed. You shouldn't be feeling pain…Maybe if I…"

Beast Boy let her mumble on without responding; it seemed a one-sided conversation. He was only distracted from the black plasma grains on her arm when she huffed in frustration and pressed her icy hand flush over the scar. Instinctively he flinched back, which woke that sharp lingering knife in his gut and made him hiss and reach for the scar. With a jolt that went through her whole body Raven gasped and recoiled. She clutched at her stomach, gasping for air, and threw him a look of bewilderment.

With the spike of pain fading, Beast Boy froze. "What just happened?"

"I…" She shook her head, and he realized that for once she wasn't filtering her words with care, she was simply speechless. Her hand went to her stomach again. "I felt that."

He resisted the urge to dig his finger into his ears and clean them out. "Um, you what?" Raven's hand lingered on her stomach and Beast Boy's concern reached a tipping point. Did she honestly just _experience_ his pain for a moment? Concern pulled his expression askance and he had to ask, "Has that ever happened before?"

"No," she said, pulling her hood back up to hide beneath it. Before he could voice any of his thousand other questions she insisted, "Something's off. I need to meditate again."

"Ah.. okay," he sighed. He'd been hoping to glean a bit more information from this encounter, but he stepped aside to let her at his bedroom door. But to his astonishment she went around him the other way and settled into the lotus position just above his computer chair.

"It'll just be a few hours," she assured him. "If you wouldn't mind doing something quiet that would be appreciated."

He was about to remind her none too gently that they were in _his_ room and he'd do whatever he damn well pleased, until it registered that yeah, they were in his room. Raven was in his room. And she wasn't leaving, apparently. That in itself was even more unprecedented than her unexpected visit. At a loss for how to react, he resigned to simply nodding and lowered himself onto the bottom bunk, peeking at her from the corner of his eye and trying not to think about what had just happened while she began her steady mantra. It was a good thing Raven hadn't demanded he turn around when she was inspecting his wound, because he would have done as she asked… But he preferred to spare her the even uglier exit wound on his back.

There was an old issue of GameZoner mag on his other pillow so he thumbed through it for awhile, wishing he could be on patrol instead. When his eyes started drooping he realized Raven's chant was lulling him to sleep, so he rose from the bed, searching for something else to do. She hovered naturally above the swivel chair and since she couldn't see him he let a fond smile dominate his face for a moment.

What a strange week. Out of everything that had happened since yesterday, funnily enough, the most difficult to believe was that Raven was meditating in here, of all places, six feet from his bedside. At that thought he looked around, embarrassed for the first time in years at his inability to keep his living space tidy. True, it wasn't the worst it'd ever been, but still, Raven _had_ told him it gave her anxiety...

Quietly he withdrew his Zune and tangled headphones from the drawer of the nightstand and turned on the rowdiest album he had. Then, he set his jaw and cleaned his room.

When he finished taking out the trash hours later, Beast Boy came back to the neatest his room had ever been. Hell, he felt brand spanking new just by stepping inside. He breathed in the woody smell of sage (he might have stolen some of Raven's from the common room) and was sure that he could really get used to living like this. The rug was visible all the way from the bed to the bookshelf! Since his side of the tower faced the open sea, the world outside his window was now blackㅡsave for the faintest slice of moon and six or seven visible stars. Beast Boy closed the blinds and settled back in with that magazine.

After a few minutes it became clear he wasn't absorbing any of the information on the page. All he could hear in his brain was _azarath, metrion, zinthos._ He laid the booklet on his face, feeling very drowsy all at once. It was Raven's voice as she spoke across the room; the chant was getting into his bloodstream and flowing up to his brain and he was closing his eyes and fading into the tide of the words.

.

.

A fluttering of pages woke Raven, and she opened her eyes to see Beast Boy sprawled across his bed, a magazine settling on the carpet below his dangling arm. She wondered what time it was. It was dark outside; she must have been meditating for quite awhile. Perhaps she should make her exit so that Beast Boy could sleep. Azar knew he probably needed his rest and she was already suspicious that she'd long overstayed her welcome. But there was something about the way he was sprawled that stirred up residual fear like silt in her brain, and even though she knew he was fine and she _knew_ she was being crazy, she needed to be sure before leaving him.

The only light in the room came from the nightstand: a neon pink lava lamp on a green base which she had never noticed before. It must have been lit for a few hours already because the goop inside was viscousㅡeven as she looked a great drooping raindrop of it detached and fell. The entire room shifted from red to darker red at the lamp's organic whims.

Raven paused by the lamp. "Beast Boy."

When he didn't rouse she raised her voice. His skin looked more orange in this lighting than green and it irked her for some reason. When he still didn't move she resorted to touching his shoulder. He was cold. Panicking, she moved her hand to his stomach and it came away wet, blood glistening in the dull neon light. White panic turned into real tangible pain and she fell to her knees, clutching her own stomach as blood seeped into her uniform, staining Beast Boy's carpet. The lava lamp shattered when she tried to scream.

Beast Boy shot upward, smacking his head on the rungs holding up the upper bunk. He cursed loudly, then rolled off the bed to crouch next to Raven, speaking words she couldn't really understand through her agony. Wasn't he dead? Was she the one who was dead? He was gripping her shoulders but it didn't mean anything next to the crippling pain killing her from the inside. A few words finally broke through the haze and some primal part of her recognized her own mantra. _Azarath, metrion, zinthos._ He was repeating the words for her.

Between one moment and the next the pain was gone. She blinked, her eyes adjusting to the dark room.

 _"ㅡyou okay?"_ he was saying.

Raven took in her position on the floor, he next to her, his pupils dilated to their fullest extent. "I must have fallen asleep," she admitted. There was no blood anywhere so it must have been a nightmare. She had never fallen asleep meditating before. That couldn't be good.

"You broke my lava lamp," he accused lightly.

"I should go," Raven deflected. "You need your rest and apparently I need mine."

"You don't have to go," Beast Boy muttered, quickly looking away as if he hadn't meant to say that. "If you don't want to, I mean. You could just stay."

Raven ogled him. "...Excuse me?"

"Come on, don't take it that way." He slumped against the side of his bed, ruffling his hair in a flustered way. "I just mean… Can I be brutally honest?"

"No thanks."

He ignored her. "I'm _worried_ about you, Rae."

Raven was worried about herself, too. "I don't think it's… appropriate," she finished, wishing afterward that she had said 'professional' instead.

"Why not?" He pulled a little music device off his bed and lit the screen before announcing, "It's way after midnight, anyway. Everyone else is probably asleep."

"I'm still wearing the same clothes I was yesterday," she noted. "I haven't been back to my own room yet."

"Gotcha covered." Even in the dark, his misplaced fang was visible when he smiled. He sifted through a drawer in his dresser until he found a t-shirt and basketball shorts and threw them at her.

Raven let them hit her face without trying to catch them. "I never said yes," she grumbled.

"You never said no either."

"I am not changing in front of you."

"Jeez, give me some credit," he complained, "I'll close my eyes."

All the same, Raven felt very self conscious as she put on his clothes, wondering if she'd taken complete leave of her senses. She didn't feel like herself. More than anything she wanted to retreat to her own bedroom and ruminate for a few days, but she couldn't bring herself to leave and she didn't know whether it was because she was scared for him or scared for herself. Possibly both. Possibly something more.

To her eternal gratitude, Beast Boy withheld any comments he might have had about the way she looked in his clothes. "One more thing," he said, and poured half of an old water bottle onto another shirt. The bed squeaked as he sat down and patted the blanket next to him.

Raven had no idea what he was up to, and was wary when she accepted his invitation. When he pressed the cold shirt onto her face she yanked away. "What are youㅡ"

"Raven," he said through his teeth, "just hold still for _one_ secondㅡ"

Black energy surrounded the wet t shirt and she hurled it across the room. Only then did Beast Boy roll his eyes with a frustrated sound. He dug something out of his nightstand and Raven suddenly found herself looking at her own face in a scratched mirror.

The confusion only lasted a moment. Then she noticed them: five streaks of crimson on her cheek. She angled her face to the side, examining the blood marks, belatedly remembering Starfire's attempt to wipe her face clean in the medbay. Raven hadn't looked in a mirror at all today and had missed this when she'd cleaned up earlier. When she recognized the stain as a handprint she took the mirror from him and laid it face down on the bed, only picking it up again to check that her face was clean after she'd scrubbed it with the shirt.

Meanwhile, Beast Boy had scooted towards the wall, looking up at the upper bunk with his hands behind his head. Raven pondered whether she should move to the top bunk for a moment, then laid down instead, facing away.

"So are we just… not gonna talk about this?"

Raven looked over her shoulder at him. "I don't know what you mean." Honestly, she didn't. She hadn't exactly been avoiding himㅡin fact she'd done the opposite.

Beast Boy only sighed, his eyes set on the glow stars pasted all over the wooden rungs of the upper bunk. Raven had never noticed those before either. Their decaying photons shone so faintly as the phosphorous released its steady green light into the dark.

* * *

 _continue in part iv . . ._


	4. lightning

.

I know, it's a fast update heheh. But I've been writing the last two chapters together over the last two weeks. The next update will probably take a little longer. Thanks to everyone reading and reviewing :)

* * *

 _part iv ㅡ lightning_

* * *

Raven wandered the halls all morning, feeling lost in her own home. Something was wrong. This much was obvious, but the trouble was figuring out exactly what went haywire, and where. And why. Had she messed something up in the healing process? Had her radical methods damaged Beast Boy's psyche? Had she somehow damaged her own along the way? Most importantly, was the damage permanent?

When she found herself outside her own bedroom door it was purely on accident, but she took the opportunity to head inside and pull every book from every shelf. Soon they were strewn about, each dusty tome open to various chapters of relevance as Raven moved back and forth between them, desperately trying to remember where she had read about shared healing states. None of her texts offered any information or even so much as a passing mention of the idea. As far as every book she'd ever studied was concerned, the concept did not exist.

So where had she read it, then? Had she imagined it?

Raven had just gone back to the first book and was about to skim through it again when there was a knock on the door.

Starfire's beaming face lit the hall when Raven opened up. "I noticed you have done the skipping of your daybreak tea ritual for two days now," Starfire said with cheer. "Perhaps you have simply forgotten?"

Raven glanced down; in her teammate's hand was a steaming teacup. That was kind of her. Even Starfire couldn't mess up plain old black tea, and Raven had to admit, she _had_ simply forgotten. Which was unlike her. "We are, all of us, creatures of habit," Raven quoted, hiding her unease as she accepted the cup. What was happening to her?

"Perhaps you would like to join us in the training room?" Starfire offered, lingering in the doorway as Raven moved to close it. "Robin is going over new defensive maneuvers that will prevent any, um, incidents from occurring, such as the one at the bank which we do not speak of." Starfire clasped her hands, innocently awaiting Raven's reply.

Raven sipped at her tea, idly wondering if it would be worth it to explain to Starfire that saying 'we do not speak of' something negates the act of choosing not to speak of it by actively speaking of it. It probably wasn't. She looked over her shoulder at the open books, more eager to research her problem than do anything else, until Starfire peered quizzically into her room.

"My apologies. Are you…" Starfire frowned at the blanket of books that completely covered the carpet. "Busy?"

Raven moved into the hall and closed the door behind her. "Just some light reading. I'll join you in the training room." She wasn't ready for anyone else to know there _was_ a problem yet.

In the training room Raven hung around the entrance while Starfire danced past the center mats where Robin and Beast Boy stood face to face and took a seat on one of the benches. The lead lines on the high arched windows cast slanted streams of light all across the room, dividing it into a barcode of sun and shade. Dust particles swirled endlessly in the stripes of light. Raven watched Robin and Beast Boy conversing quietly, Robin throwing his hands this way and that. It would've looked like a very animated lecture except that Beast Boy was attempting to mimic Robin's slow motion movements.

Was this where Beast Boy had been all day? When she stirred in the bright bedroom this morning he'd already been gone.

"Hiya, Rave." Cyborg sauntered up on her left, carting half a dozen weights over his shoulder. "Long time no see," he joked. "Here to spar?"

"In a bit. I'd like to stretch first."

Beast Boy shot her a winning smile as he noticed her stretching at the edge of the room and sent her two thumbs up. "There you are, Raven! Hey, check these fresh moves out!" He motioned to Robin to back up and take it from the top. For the first time Raven noticed the staff at Robin's toolbelt and a pang of unease shot through her as he unhitched it and snapped it out to its full extent before him. Beast Boy fell into battle stance.

"Go!" Robin shouted, and lunged forward. Raven reached out without meaning to, a wordless shout at the tip of her tongue.

.

.

Robin lunged at him and Beast Boy twisted, anticipating his teammate's moves, and when he came back around to grab the weapon like Robin had showed him he was no longer in the training room. Ancient flagstone steps led up to an altar, with great stained glass windows rising up a hundred feet behind brass organ pipes. A hand on his shoulder made him turn. He had to crane his neck to look up at the robed figure looming overhead, a wizened old face that betrayed no sign of life beyond the steady movements of breath. He stood as a statue looking up at the colored glass and squeezed Beast Boy's shoulder so hard it hurt.

"Ow!" he complained, and the altar at the top of the steps cracked down the middle. "You're hurting me." The man's grip tightened and Beast Boy struggled to push it away, but his own hands were tiny. He was weak and young and small.

The man's jaw scarcely moved as he spoke. "What are you feeling right now, Raven?"

"I'm scared," she spat, still trying to squirm away from the man's hand. "I hate this place. I hate you. I want to go home."

The man waved one hand and the broken altar was engulfed in white light. "That is most unfortunate. You have much to learn, child of Trigon. But I can assure you this. Take my teachings to heart and you will triumph over emotion. Take my teachings to heart and there will come a day that you will experience the greatest of pains and feel nothing at all."

After a moment the white light faded and the altar was whole, not a crack to be seen on its ornate carved surface. Despite the warmth and well-meaning behind his words Raven was aghast at the implication, and when she looked up into Azar's face she saw him smile for the first and only time. The windows shattered. Stained glass rained in the temple and Raven threw her arms overhead to shield her face.

"What the hell was that?" Robin shouted. Beast Boy lowered his arms and saw Robin flat on his back on the sparring mat. The staff was miles away, lying forgotten on the other side of the training room. Flabbergasted, Beast Boy squinted up through the shimmering dust; the windows of the training room were intact. Robin flipped onto his feet, growing more agitated as Beast Boy continued to evade the question. "That was not what we've been working on for the last three hours! Where is your head?"

Beast Boy could only shrug wildly. "Uh… sorry?"

"And you!" To Beast Boy's surprise, Robin turned on Raven. "I'm trying to train here. Is there a reason you interfered?" He was pointing at his staff now; Beast Boy was beginning to get an inkling of what had happened.

Raven folded her arms, matching Robin glare for glare. "Yes, actually. Beast Boy is still recovering from his injury. Don't you think it's wildly inappropriate to be training when he almost died just two days ago?" Robin opened his mouth to retort but Raven didn't give him the opportunity. "That aside, the incident at the bank had nothing to do with a lack of training, and we all know it. It had to do with a lack of self control."

 _"What?"_ Everyone looked at Beast Boy and he slapped his hand over his mouth. Seriously though, what?

Raven turned her back on them, grabbing her cloak off the rack where she had left it and throwing it over one shoulder. "Fine. I'm not team leader. Do what you will." And she left.

Starfire and Cyborg fell into hushed whispers in the corner by the weights and Beast Boy decided he'd regret it later if he didn't go after her now.

"Uh, Beast Boy, we're not done here," Robin shouted after him, his voice echoing in the rafters.

But Beast Boy was already at the arched entryway and offered only an apologetic wave. "Sorry, Rob. Not feeling so good after all. Continue later?" He was gone before Robin could answer.

"Wait up!" Beast Boy called out after Raven, but had to shift into a greyhound to give chase, changing over to a sparrow just in time to zip into the elevator before the doors closed. "What did you mean it had to do with self control?" he seethed.

Raven pushed the number for their shared floor and the lift rumbled to life. "You know exactly what I meant, Beast Boy."

"No," he said, "I don't. Would you _look_ at me?" He slammed his hand on the emergency stop button and Ravenㅡwho'd been hovering in placeㅡhit her head on the ceiling. "You've been avoiding this subject ever since I gotㅡ"

"It's your own fault," she snapped, lowering herself just enough to glare down directly into his eyes like he'd asked. "It only happened because you lost your temper in battle. You let Red X get into your head and you almost died because of it. I can't protect you from yourself, Beast Boy."

She dropped even closer and Beast Boy's mind melted into a white blank page. Her hair brushed his cheek as his back hit the wall of the elevator and he almost leaned in for it until he noticed her reaching past him. When he looked down he saw her pressing the button for their floor again. Right. He let his head fall against the wall and focused hard on not sliding down onto the tile in dejection. Raven alit on the ground and retreated to lean against the far wall with a severe look on her face.

" _That's_ what I meant."

"It's a start," Beast Boy mumbled.

"What?"

Beast Boy trailed at her heels as she exited the elevator. "That was the most we've talked about what happened since it happened. So, it's a start."

"We don't need to talk about it," Raven rationalized.

Beast Boy placed himself between Raven and her door, barring her entry with an outstretched arm. "Yes, we do. We really do." Now more than ever. "Something is wrong, Raven, can't you tell? What _happened_ back there in the training room? You did something to me..."

Maybe he'd gone too far. Raven's eyebrows furrowed and she actually stepped back into a defense stance. "What are you talking about?"

Beast Boy removed his hand from the door frame, unsure what to make of her reaction. "I mean… First you're feeling pain that's mine, now I'm seeing memories that are yours. How can you not want to talk about this?"

Raven returned to her normal stoic stance and Beast Boy was reminded uncannily of Azar. She waited a good long minute before responding. "You saw a memory?"

"Well… yeah," he reiterated, a lot less accusational this time around. Had she really not been aware of what was happening to him in the training room? " _Your_ memory."

"Move," she commanded. When he refused she pushed past him into her room, but she could do nothing to stop him following her inside.

He let out a low whistle as he took in the mess on her floor. "Studying?"

The dumb statement went ignored. "I hate to admit it but you're right," she said instead, flying right over the open books to land near her bed. "Something is wrong."

"Gathered that much myself, thanks."

"Beast Boy." Busy wondering what the heck she was looking for in all these books, he had to tear his gaze from the pages to find her again. "Are you… aware what I had to do in order to save you?"

By the door Beast Boy fidgeted, glad there was an ocean of books separating them. Starfire's words resonated in the back of his mind again. _Raven brought your mindscapes together._ He grew uncomfortable under her stare and wished there were a thousand more books in the room, stacked so high she couldn't see him. "Yeah," he admitted. "I know what you did."

"Then you can see where I'm going with this."

"I can hazard a guess."

Waving one hand, Raven closed the covers on all the books in the room. "This is serious. I've never dealt with something of this nature, or magnitude. I've created mental links with people before but this is so, so different. I've never felt another person's pain. Are you sure you saw a memory of mine?"

Beast Boy fiddled with a tiny statue on the shelf, thinking of Azar's carved face. "I'm sure."

"That makes this even more complicated than I thought it was. Since this is happening to both of us, I need to be honest with you." With a sigh, Raven sat on her bed. "I've been searching all day and I have no idea where I read about shared healing states. There's no mention of them anywhere, so I don't have the slightest clue what I did wrong."

"Don't think of it like that." Stepping carefully between books, Beast Boy waded across the room to join her by the bed. "We don't even know what happened. It was probably my fault," he joked.

The corner of her mouth twitched upward. "Could be."

Beast Boy crouched down into her line of sight, hitting her with his most optimistic, radiant smile. "We don't need your books. We can figure it out on our own."

Raven replied but whatever she said was drowned out by the keen of the red alert that lit up the room. On mutual wordless agreement Raven grabbed Beast Boy's arm and warped them up to the main floor for debriefing.

"Red X," Cyborg said, immediately upon their arrival. The others were already gathered near the screen. "Regional History Museum."

"Awesome," Beast Boy gloated, "time for some payback!"

Robin shot him down. "Absolutely not. Cyborg, Starfire, and I are taking this call. You and Raven are going to sit this one out."

Beast Boy almost had an aneurysm. "You've got to be kidding me. I'm completely healed!" Physically, it was true. Just because he was feeling some weird phantom pain where he'd been injured didn't mean he wasn't fit to fight. He rounded on Raven. "Come on Rae, back me up here!" But she looked like she'd retreated into her own little world.

Shaking his head, Robin stood firm. "Beast Boy, you're just too close to this and you've already lost your cool with Red X once with dire consequences. I can't risk that again so soon. Besides, if I'm understanding correctly, your pain hasn't totally subsided yet. As for you, Ravenㅡ"

"Yes," she deadpanned, "please explain why _I'm_ unfit for battle."

"That's exactly why," Robin snapped. "You're not acting like yourself. Look, I'll be straight with you guys. It's painfully obvious, as evidenced by whatever just happened in the training room, that you both still need time to recover from the incident at the bank and _yes_ , Raven, that includes you. Sorry to do this to you but it's my call. You're both on active probation until further notice."

Beast Boy's loud objections went ignored as Robin motioned for Cyborg and Starfire to fall out. Even so, he continued long after they had left the tower, shouting at no one, kicking pieces of furniture in his frustration.

"Would you chill out?" Raven finally ground out, sounding like she was almost to her breaking point. "Your anger is affecting me."

"I've been stuck here for two days while they hunt Red X," he shouted. "I feel like I'm trapped in purgatory on this stupid island. Why doesn't Robin just attach an ankle monitor to me?"

"Don't be stupid." Fire raged in his eyes as he rounded on her again, but dulled as she went on. "Robin is more right than he knows. You know that, I know that. Maybe it's better that you and I stay put until we figure out what's going on, anyway. Besides, it's not like you're actually under house arrest," she added sarcastically. "Why don't you go outside for some fresh air? You'll feel better."

When the girl was right, she was right. For once he decided to take her advice. But he couldn't help being a little suspicious of Raven's motivations as she followed him down the beach toward his favorite spot on the rocks.

"I don't need a babysitter," he assured her. "I'm not going anywhere."

Raven sat next to him, though she didn't match his motions as he lowered his feet into the spraying surf and instead crossed her legs. "Can you blame me for not believing you?"

Beast Boy tried not to smile but failed. "I guess not."

The sun was sinking low into the clouds. All around them a storm was blowing in off the sea, and to the north and south the sky was gray though sunset was still hours away. In the distance lightning flashed high above the water, but their little island was still bathed in the last remaining patch of blue sky and sunlight. The lightning was probably still too far off for Raven to hear any thunder, but Beast Boy's ears perked as they picked up a low rumble on the salt winds.

"I don't know how to fix this."

Beast Boy stopped kicking his feet in the water. "Whatever 'this' is."

"I'll figure it out."

The last sliver of sun went behind the storm and Raven pulled her cloak tightly around herself as a chill wind blew. They both looked skyward; a flock of seagulls was fleeing inland and the air filled with their melancholy cries.

"We'll figure it out," Beast Boy amended. "And we can start by talking. We're not gonna figure out what went wrong by avoiding what happened forever. I mean, I don't exactly _want_ to talk about it. It freaking sucked. But we need to start somewhere, you know. Why not from the beginning?"

Raven nodded, mulling over his words. The frothing of the water increased as the wind rose, and as Beast Boy withdrew his feet from the water Raven leaned over the edge of the boulder they were sitting on, peering into the tide. He was about to ask what she was doing when a small spiral seashell broke the surface, rising into the air on dark energy. Specks of mud fell whence they came as Raven plucked it from the air and released her magical hold on it.

She turned it over in her hand a few times, then tossed it back into the sea.

"How much do you remember of what happened?"

Beast Boy swallowed. Too much, probably. "A lot." He'd been unbearably coherent as Raven had desperately tried to sew his skin shut with her powers.

"What's the last thing you remember?"

"Hang on." He was so tired but he managed to remove his glove. After fighting a brief internal battle he reached a bloody gloveless hand up and touched her face more tenderly than he'd ever touched anyone. Everything was blurry but he felt her go still as he brushed his thumb along her cheek to catch a tear that had fallen. God, she was so important. She had to know. That was all that mattered.

"Okay," he said evenly. "Go."

"Beast Boy?" He jumped. She had a taken ahold of his wrist a few inches from her face.

The cold spray as a wave glanced off the rocks brought him crashing back to the present. "Sorry," he squeaked, yanking his arm back. What was wrong with him! "Last thing I remember. I, uh…" There was no point lying or omitting; she had _been_ there, she knew what he did. "I wanted you to feel my emotions. I took my glove off. I said 'okay, go.'" Fractal lightning flashed in quick succession, much closer this time. Thunder echoed throughout the city and far, far away, a car alarm sounded. "Maybe we should head inside," he suggested lightly.

Raven was quiet. Beast Boy had to fight the urge to take off into the storm and never come back. Maybe talking about what happened wasn't such a good ideaㅡhe should've been content to let this get swept under the rug forever. Anything but this torture.

"Is that really the very last thing you recall?" she prompted.

"Yeah." He was growing concerned over the inquisitive tone of her voice. "Why?"

"I was wondering. What does _kupendwa_ mean?"

Beast Boy lurched to his feet so fast that he slipped off the rock and went splashing into the water, arms flailing. He immediately flew back out, shaking off the icy water as a polar bear before morphing back. "Where did you hear that?" he coughed, his throat lined with salt water.

Raven dropped the shield she'd thrown around her to hit him with a withering look. "From you," she said, getting to her feet and shaking the water that he had managed to splash her with from her arms. "It is Swahili, isn't it?"

Shit. Shit! "Yeah," he groaned. "It is."

"You said a lot of stuff in Swahili," she noted, squeezing the edge of her cloak like a sponge onto the rocks, "toward the end. What does it mean?"

"It doesn't matter." He could hear her following him as he retreated back up to the tower but he refused to acknowledge her. "Drop it."

The back door wouldn't open and as he punched it in anger he realized Raven was holding it shut with her powers. "No," she said. "If we want to figure out what went wrong I need to know what you were thinking about when we went into the healing trance. It might be important, if I cleared my mind as we were going under but you were thinking about something. Maybe we got lost. Maybe our mindscapes got tangled. I don't know, but you're not being helpful right now."

"It's nothing, okay?" Birds cried out behind them as thunder rattled the window on the door. A solitary raindrop hit the back of his neck and he wiped at it absentmindedly. "It's from a song. Something my parents used to sing when I was a kid."

"A song?"

The black energy disappeared from the door handle. Flooded with relief, Beast Boy turned it and left her on the steps as the wind flung a few more stray droplets at them from the west. "Just a song," he repeated with a hint of finality that said _drop this subject forever_ , "about birds in the rain."

* * *

 _continue in part v . . ._

* * *

Ooo, title drop!

Again, I won't translate in the footnotes because a translation will come later. In-story. Patience, friends. xo


	5. sparks

might turn out to be more than 7 chapters, idk, we'll see.

* * *

 _part v ㅡ sparks_

* * *

The back door slammed against the jamb, rattling the glass pane, and Raven smothered the urge to swear loudly after him through the closed door. She never swore; _Beast Boy_ swore.

The beginnings of rain pattered against her cloak and she drew her hood up as the wind began to howl. _Birds in the rain…_ These words stirred a sad nostalgia deep in her heart and she had to wonder if the emotion was even her own. Whatever they meant, they were obviously important to have made Beast Boy react that way. Ignoring the blaring fact that she would normally be the one storming offㅡleaving Beast Boy to do the unsolicited followingㅡshe used her powers to throw the door open and fly inside to find him.

The entryway was dark. Unnaturally so.

Had he turned off the lights out of spite? Turning back, expecting to see the gray rain-spattered window on the door, she instead saw only more darkness. There was no light switch on the wall at all; instead of smooth wallpaper, woodgrain met her searching hand and when she pulled back sharply to remove the splinter from her finger she tripped, falling onto a cot that lay in the middle of the room. She was not where she thought she was.

Gradually her eyes adjusted to the dark and though she was alarmed, a gentle swaying motion began lulling her into a sense of security. The world was rocking beneath the floorboards. Someone laughed not too far away and Raven climbed back out of bed to go find them. She was thirsty. Around the corner a great swatch of fabric stretched across the doorway, letting flickering orange light cast long shadows through the loose folds into the rest of the tiny house. She peeked through a gap.

Outside were a hundred thousand stars. On the deck of the boat a little fire crackled in a stone box and two tall figures stood close to it, soft and silhouetted in yellow against the starry night, swaying in time with the rocking of the boat.

The shorter of the two laughed again, and leaned in to whisper. "Sing it again?"

"You ask too much of a poor man," he chuckled in response. The woman flicked him lightly on the nose and he conceded. "Ndiyo, fine. One more time, chiriku." The man pulled the woman close and brushed her long wavy hair behind her back before pulling her into a stance more suited to a waltz than the native lullaby he hummed so softly in her ear. " _Alizaliwa tarehe upepo. Maua katika macho. Kupendwa, kwa siri, kupendwa. Kupendwa, kwa siri, kupendwa."_

The woman broke off and spun with quiet grace, the folds of her fabric brushing the edge of the firepit. Sparks spiraled astray. The man stumbled out of step to stamp one out with a bare foot on the wooden deck, cursing under his breath as he swatted another spark burning a hole through the woman's skirt.

He pulled her back to his chest, saying, "You will be the death of me!" before taking her hand again and resuming the slow dance.

" _Si dhoruba, si dhoruba hofu."_ His voice took on a sad, wistful edge. He pressed his forehead to hers and hidden in the shadows Raven was stung by a kind of sorrow she'd felt before. It was happiness, but it was the kind that hinted of untold tragedy to follow in days ahead. It burned, like fire under stars. Something popped in the firepit and sparks scurried up toward the arm of the Milky Way, but neither of the couple took notice. " _Katika pwani ya…"_ the man mumbled into her hair, " _nyumba yangu. Lakini ndege waliokwenda... samaki huko, samaki huko."_

"Oh!" The woman caught Raven's eye and smiled. "Gar's awake." The man straightened, following his wife's gaze toward the canvas doorway as she beckoned their son out onto the deck. "You're supposed to be sleeping," she scolded lightly. "Did we wake you?"

Gar skipped nimbly toward them, at ease with the rocking of the boat. "Hakuna. 'm just thirsty. Maji, mama?" He tugged on her skirt until she went to procure a canteen from a cooler near the rail.

"Here." She sat by the rail and tugged Gar onto her lap. "Baba was singing for me," she whispered, tickling his sides and almost making him spit out his water. "Let's let him finish, ndiyo?"

Gar crossed his arms, sulking as his dad poked the dying fire back to life with a branch. "I hate that song."

Grabbing his chin, his mother made him look up into her stern face. "That's not nice, Garfield. I used to sing _kisiwa chiriku_ when you were a baby!"

Gar pouted and huffed through his puffed out cheeks. "Sing a happy one! That one's _sad_."

At that his dad only chuckled, shielding his eyes from a fresh wave of sparks as the fire kicked it into high gear. "Yeah, it's a sad lullaby. But it's happy too, Gar. Someday you'll understand. Someday you'll sing this song to some other girl with flowers in her eyes."

His mother softened, brushing Gar's shaggy yellow hair away from his forehead to kiss him there. "Please finish dear," she asked, "you know how I love the last verse."

Gar's eyes drooped as the orange of the fire burned his retinas and his dad began to sing.

A twig snapped in the distance and Gar stumbled, slipping out of tiger form back to human as he landed face down in the moist soil. The two tiger cubs he'd been playing with came slinking back to sniff at him. He listened, ears perked, poised to run if the mama tiger was returning, but the ambient noise of rainforest life had resumed and he heard nothing else out of the ordinary.

These tiger cubs had no qualm about playing with a green tiger, but they were wary now as they sniffed at his human hands. He held his hands out palm up, holding still as a baobab in the wind while they decided what to do with him. He wasn't scared of them, just of losing the first friends he'd found since he'd been left on his own.

Eventually they decided he was still a friend and launched back into playtime. Gar laughed, chasing them around the forest floor and up the side of a hollow dead tree onto a soft hill covered with fallen leaves, kicking a pod of resting butterflies into flight as they fell into the undergrowth. The cubs crawled onto him, nipping harmlessly at his arms and legs until they tuckered themselves out.

"You guys tired?" he asked, scratching one lazy cub behind the ear. The cub liked that, and promptly rolled over onto its back, kicking its paws in the air. "Me too," he sighed. He hadn't had a good night's sleep in months. "My parents used to sing me a song to help me sleep," he said. "You wanna hear it?"

Both cubs yowled when he stopped petting them, and he took that as a yes. " _Kupendwa,"_ he murmured, " _kupendwa."_ His vocal chords were scratchy from months of disuse, and he didn't have his father's rich smooth voice yet. But he remembered the words of the last verse, his mom's favorite. " _Tamu kisiwa chiriku… kupendwa. Aliruka kupitia mvua... kumwambia. Kumwambia kupendwa."_

One cub's ears twitched as a teardrop wet its fur, but didn't wake. Gar was just beginning to drift off as well when an earth-shattering roar ripped him out of sleep into the waking world. The cubs woke with a start and went scattering back to their mother, who bared her teeth at Garfield like he was a venomous serpent. Thinking fast, he transformed back into a tiger, but this only infuriated the mother more and she crouched, ready to lungeㅡ but then she froze.

Her ears perked to the south. Somewhere in the forest a branch snapped again.

Distracted by the noise, Gar lost his hold on the tiger form and became human in a blink. Several branches snapped in unison all too nearby and, unmistakeably, somebody swore in Swahili.

" _Tena!"_

" _Did you see that?"_

All three tigers took off into the trees, leaving Gar to fend for himself. His heart stopped. His dad's voice echoed in his head, his final advice. _Unless it's someone you know, don't let anyone see you. If they do, run._

Garfield ran.

There were shouts all around him and when he turned into a parrot to escape into the canopy the shouts reached a climax. Branches swatted him on all sides until finally he emerged into the glaring sun. He spread his wings to their fullest extent and was flapping into the vast blue sky when a dark lattice obsured the view of freedom; a net closed around him and he plunged toward the forest as swiftly as if he'd been shot.

Green replaced blue and then everything was black.

When Raven woke she could still feel the net on her and self-preservation sent her into a frenzy as he tried to free herself. Something tore and she rent the net from her body, throwing it away. Fluorescent light assailed her. Her indigo cloak slumped to the floor and as she stood panting she realized she was in the common room. Everyone was there. Everyone was staring.

Robin vaulted over the counter in alarm, ready for action. "Raven, what's wrong?"

Raven looked from him, to Cyborg, to Starfire, to her cloak on the ground. Not a net. Just her cloak… She looked up at Beast Boy, at last understanding what had happened to her. He didn't seem to have noticed her entrance; he was hunched over the dining table, reading something she couldn't quite see.

"You guys are back already?" she wondered.

Robin's eyebrow creased and he made his way across the room toward her. "We've been back for hours. What's gotten into you?"

What time was it? How long had she been out? Raven deflected Robin's second question as well, answering with her own. "Did you apprehend Red X?"

Cyborg stood from his place at the table next to Beast Boy. "No. Unfortunately. He's been a bit... unstable, since what happened. Kinda makes it seem like he was holding back before."

Awesome. Just great. "I see. Beast Boy," she called out, "we need to talk." He was either completely ignoring her or was so absorbed in the paper he was holding that he didn't hear her. "Hello?"

Starfire flew over and placed her hand softly but firmly on Raven's arm. "I think perhaps you and I should do the talking first," she suggested in a suspiciously benign, neutral tone.

"But I need toㅡ "

"It will just be a moment," Starfire assured her, pushing none too gently, and the door hissed shut to seal them out in the hallway.

"What's this about?" Raven hissed, but promptly shut up as Starfire handed her a piece of paper.

She read it over, once, twice, three times, still not believing what she was seeing no matter how many times she read it. Unbelievable. Starfire started to say something soothing but Raven pushed past her, overriding the code on the door to let her back into the common room.

.

.

"Robin, are you serious?" Raven demanded hotly as she entered, then paused a moment to reign herself in. She always seemed a little more careful of her moods in here, since she was aware of how many valuable electronics were housed in this room, and how much delicate glass. "I am not going to therapy," she said with dangerous calm.

Beast Boy looked up from his paper at last. He'd known from the second Robin handed him the order that Raven was not going to like it. Not that he particularly enjoyed it himself. Robin stepped in front of him, obscuring Raven from Beast Boy's view, which for some reason pissed him off.

"Look," Robin eased, "I'm not stupid. You've both been showing signs of severe post-traumatic stress and we can't just not address it. This team doesn't function like that. It can't."

"I don't need therapy and neither does Beast Boy. Do you?"

Robin turned back to the one in question, frowning, and Beast Boy caught a glimpse of Raven. He knew she wanted him to say no, but... Thinking of his ghost pain he opted for honesty. "I don't know."

Raven summoned her cloak with her powers, refusing to look at any of them. "You guys don't understand. There's more at play here than any of you know and I don't have time to deal with this. Beast Boy, we need to talk _right now._ "

The sound of Beast Boy's chair scraping against the tile was louder than the thunder outside. He followed Raven out into the hall. She kept on walking and he kept following until he rounded a corner at the end of the corridor and almost walked right smack into her. She looked so… disheveled. She was dripping wet like she'd been out in the rain ever since he left her on the doorstep. Her hair all a tangle, her cloak hanging from one hand, dragging on the floor... It was disconcerting.

"What's up, Rae?"

"I've just been in your mindscape. Was that what you meant when you said you saw a memory of mine?"

He blinked, taking a step back. "You… What? Wait, you what?"

Raven advanced on him, letting her cloak drop again. "Your mindscape. I've just been there. Earlier today you said you saw a memory of mine. Did you mean you _went into_ my mindscape?"

Reeling with this fresh information, he backed up so far he tripped on an upturned corner of the carpet and had to steady himself against the wall. "I don't know, it all happened so fast," he rattled off numbly. "One second I was in the training room, the next I was in a cathedral on Azarath. I didn't do it on purpose," he defended.

"Neither did I," Raven pointed out, "but it happened. Wait, you were in…?" Her eyes grew wide and her lips pressed together. She backed away from him. "What _exactly_ did you see in my mind, Beast Boy?"

Beast Boy was torn between apologizing and demanding _she_ give _him_ answers; he felt he'd inadvertently violated her privacy, but at the same time he knew she'd just done the exact same thing to him. The trespass was obviously mutual and his curiosity was crippling his ability to comfort her. He tried anyway. "Calm down, Raven, we'll figure this out."

That was the wrong thing to say. The light fixture behind him shattered; sparks stung his cheek and a splinter of glass fell down the neck of his uniform.

"I'm not going to calm down," she told him. "You went into my mind. What did you see?"

That was his breaking point. "What did _you_ see?" he demanded, poking her in the chest with an accusatory finger. It couldn't have been anything wonderful, judging by this freakout.

Raven slapped his hand away. "This isn't a joke, Beast Boyㅡ "

"This goes both ways!"

"We're not supposed to be able to just waltz into other people's minds like that. It took me years just to make a stable entrypoint into my own psyche via my mirror. Thisㅡ" she broke off, turning toward the light at the far end of the hall. "This is simply unprecedented. This can't be good. We need to find whatever is still connecting us and sever it before this escalates any further out of my control."

"It's not the end of the world," he snapped, "so you can stop vilifying me now, thanks, it's not like I asked for this to happen! Nobody forced you to save me."

"That's a stupid thing to say. Next time I'll just let you die then?" she muttered sarcastically.

Beast Boy made a horrible face at her back and contemplated every cuss word in the book before turning heel to leave her in the dim hall, hissing back with a fair amount of venom, "Whatever floats your boat, _babe_."

She grabbed him by the arm, halting his retreat. "Cut that out!" she seethed, and the light at the other end of the hall burst too. "We need to get along long enough to find a solution to this."

Beast Boy glared her down, his jaw set. "It can wait." Why was she being so stubborn?

"No it can't," she fretted, her grip on his arm tightening.

Her obvious discomfort broke something inside him and he heard himself shouting. "Why not? What is your problem? It's just _me,_ Raven, what is the absolute worst that could happen to you?"

"It becomes irreversible!"

In the wake of that statement she relented her hold on him somewhat, and seemed to realize she'd said something wrong. Her expression relaxed from anger to something more gentle and when he tugged his arm away like a hurt dog she let it go.

"Beast Boy…"

He shook his head and she quieted. More disappointment than he meant to expose leaked into his voice when he spoke again. "Would it really be that horrible to be irreversibly connected to me?"

"Um, friends?"

Raven and Beast Boy flinched away from each other like they'd been caught doing much worse than arguing. Starfire's eyes lit the hall with an unearthly green light, and Cyborg activated a searchlight on his wrist to cast their direction, heightening the image that they'd been caught in some kind of tryst. "Hey, green bean. I uh.. need to show you something. Downstairs. Pronto."

Beast Boy glared daggers at the guy who was supposed to be his best friend. "Kinda busy here, Cy," he barked. Seriously. Seriously? Had they heard all of that?

"Coincidentally, I too have something to share with Raven," Starfire added, descending directly between Raven and Beast Boy, "in a separate part of the Tower."

"I'm in the middle of something," Raven growled, even as Star began to drag her away, all the while humming a loud and discordant Tamaranean shanty. "I know you can hear me, Starfire." But the stronger girl was relentless, and all Raven could do was hit Beast Boy with one last unreadable look before disappearing around the corner with Star.

* * *

 _continue in part vi . . ._

* * *

Again with the Swahili and no translation! What am I, some kind of sadistic monster? Haha maybe a little bit. I PROMISE to deliver on this. Later. Later...

I'll give you a bit, though:

 _ndiyo_ ㅡ _yes_

 _hakuna_ ㅡ _no_

 _chiriku_ ㅡ _songbird_

 _maji_ ㅡ _water_

 _tena_ ㅡ _again_

xoxo


	6. moonlight

With the rate this is going there will be at least three more parts, so it's looking like nine parts in total. Just fyi. :)

* * *

 _part vi_ _ㅡ_ _moonlight_

* * *

"Starfire, _stop_." Starfire ceased her humming when Raven wrenched her arm free a dozen halls down from the main corridor. They didn't even seem to be headed toward any specific room; Starfire kept ducking into random entryways and at one point even turned around and backtracked, like she was trying to lose someone in deep in a labyrinth. The only thing at the end of the hall Starfire was now dragging Raven along was a forgotten, unused supply closet. "Where are we going? There are important things I'm supposed to beㅡ"

"Please, friend, I do not wish to allow you and Beast Boy to resume your fight," Starfire interrupted, causing Raven to flush. How much of that conversation had been overheard by their teammates?

"We weren't fighting," she denied. "There's something he and I need to figure out."

"To do with the accident at the bank?" Starfire was all soft edges, nothing but tenderness and understanding. For some reason instead of calming Raven, this time it only served to fuel her restlessness and unease.

"That's between Beast Boy and myself."

Floating to the lightswitch on the wall, Starfire activated the lights; Raven hadn't even realized how dark it was at the end of the hallway until she was squinting up at Starfire's face through a fluorescent glare. "Robin has informed me of his willingness to lift the sanction for mandatory therapy if you are willing to share your private thoughts with me instead." Clasping her hands together, she added, "That is preferable, no?"

Mouth hanging ajar, Raven folded her arms. Of all the dirty tricks. "Robin is way out of line. I won't be forced to do anything I don't want to."

"But the lingering aftereffects of yours and Beast Boy's experience are affecting the team dynamic andㅡ"

"Robin's words?"

Ignoring that, Starfire plowed on. "Please, Raven, I have studied the earthly therapy techniques! I believe I can truly assist you as you work through the issues. For example..." She paused to reach into her shirt and Raven almost did a double-take when she extracted a pen and a folded piece of paper. "Please use this piece of paper to draw a house."

The paper and pen waved around under Raven's nose but she refused to take them. "You can't be serious."

"Oh, but I am quite serious! Please, do for me the humoring?" Fluttering her eyelashes sadly, she finally beamed as Raven reluctantly accepted the offering.

Raven turned to the wall, wondering what Starfire could possibly be on about with this. She scribbled a quick doodle of questionable artistic integrity, then shoved the paper and pen back into Starfire's waiting, outstretched arms. All she'd drawn was a giant T on an island. A couple of waves below, a crescent moon in the sky, a star or two. Definitely not a masterpiece by any definition. Raven felt a belated pang of guilt as Starfire poured over it, knowing that her drawing was almost certainly not what she was supposed to have done for whatever therapeutic exercise Starfire had in mind.

But the guilt receded as Starfire peered over the edge of the paper with a degree of blatant scrutiny that made Raven feel naked.

"You were using the sarcasm," Starfire noted. "But I believe you have given me information anyway." She flipped the paper back toward Raven and observed it with a thoughtful, faraway look. She pointed at the tower. "Your default idea of home is with your friends. With us. This is healthy, I think." But Starfire's gleeful smile was fleeting; it faded into something wistful and sad, and she slid her finger up to the moon where it hung in the corner of the crinkled page. "But you drew a moon instead of a sun… It is nighttime in your heart right now Raven, I can tell. Please, why are you frightened? What is wrong?"

Raven snatched the paper away from Starfire with her powers and crumpled it in her hands. "I'm _not_ frightened," Raven protested, "and I refuse to be analyzed beneath a microscope. You can tell that to Robin." With one last apologetic glance at Starfire (she was coming from a place of empathy, Raven understood that even in her state of distress) Raven opened a portal to her bedroom and retreated into it.

.

.

The second Beast Boy entered the passcode to open his bedroom door, Cyborg pushed him unceremoniously inside and followed after.

"What gives?" Beast Boy snapped, stumbling over the legs of the computer chair in the middle of the room.

"I'll come right out with it, B. Robin said if you talk to me about this then you don't have to do the therapy thing."

"Like hell Iㅡ"

"What was all that in the hallway with Rave just now?" Cyborg threw his arms out questioningly. "You guys have been acting just plain _weird_ ever since the bank. I can help you. Just tell me what's _up_ with you guys."

Beast Boy retreated to his bed, flopping down on the bottom bunk with dramatic flair. "Nope. Nuh-uh. Not having this conversation."

A series of indignant squeaks told him Cyborg had found a seat in the swivel chair. Beast Boy rolled over to face the wall, really trying not to ponder how much of that conversation Cy had heard.

Cyborg sighed and the chair squeaked a bit more. "Look, kid… I know we joke but I care about you. I can always tell when there's more going on, and I _know_ there's more going on between you and Raven than meets the eye."

Great, Cy was putting on his Big Brother Voice. The intent was appreciated but this was so far removed from what he needed right now. Beast Boy grabbed a pillow and smashed it over his head, submerging himself in darkness. "I am _so_ not having this conversation!" he yelled, voice muffled by cotton and fluff. "You wanna talk about the birds and the bees? Go find Robin."

Three quick knocks sounded on the door.

"There he is," Beast Boy drawled. "Now's your chance. Good luck!"

But when Cyborg opened the door it wasn't Robin's voice Beast Boy heard, but Starfire's.

"Switch?" Cyborg whispered back at her, much less quietly. "What, no luck?" More unintelligible whispers from Star, then Cyborg said, "Fine. It's probably a good idea, I'm making no progress anyway. Hear that, green bean? We're trading off. Be nice to Starfire or I'll smother you with that pillow, got it?"

Beast Boy made an obscene gesture but Cyborg only laughed as the door slid closed behind him.

Bedsprings creaked under him as Starfire took a seat at the edge of the bed. He didn't have the heart to fight her as she pried the pillow away from his face, holding it to her chest like a teddy bear. "What happened to your lava lamp?" she asked conversationally.

Beast Boy frowned at the wall and answered without thinking. "Raven had a nightmare." With a jolt he sat up, eyeing Star warily as he realized all-too-late the implication of what he'd just said.

But Starfire only smiled and said, "I'll get you a new one for your birthday. I know of a fun store at the mall that sells them."

At her nonchalance about the matter, Beast Boy had to laugh. Starfire was so weird about stuff like this. A tiny smile tugged at him and he shuffled over so he was sitting next to her at the edge, and followed her gaze to the shards of glass and pink-stained carpet which he still hadn't had the motivation to clean up.

He ran his hand through his hair with a grimace. "It's not like it has to be a secret," he began, hesitantly. "It's just, you guys wouldn't understand." He knew Star was here for answers, but he didn't have the ones she wanted. "This thing is between me and Raven."

"It seems so." Star nodded thoughtfully before adding, "But that doesn't mean your friends must be left in the dark. Raven is most concerned, and that concerns us all." She nudged a piece of stained glass with her foot, flipping it over on the carpet so that it reflected Beast Boy's own face at him. "Something went wrong with her spell?"

"I don't know." He hung his head in his hands, blocking out his bedroom again. "Yeah. I guess. She thinks it's her fault. I think it's mine, though."

"Is this why you have been spending so much time together since the accident?"

A flash of lightning struck the ocean closeby and lit the room with white light, making them both jump. "Oh," Beast Boy breathed as thunder rolled over the city. He'd forgotten it was raining. The gray window was quiet and dark and devoid of raindrops. The wind must be blowing in hard from the north, leaving his south side of the tower in a state of false calm in the incoming storm. "You uh… you noticed that?"

Starfire giggled and elbowed him in the ribs. "It has not been a well-kept secret, if indeed it was one at all…"

"Ow," he complained, rubbing his side.

Horror struck her. "Apologies!" she gasped. "I forgot you are still feeling pain!"

Beast Boy shook his head; already the flare of pain was subsiding. The feeling had been growing more distant all day, like he was feeling the echo of someone else's pain instead of his own. He didn't like it. "It's nothing," he told her, going to open the window so she wouldn't see the unease written across his face.

Everything in his room woke up as the wind rushed in to flap pages of books and rattle knick knacks on his shelves. The fresh air grounded him. He felt more alive.

"Beast Boy…" He jumped when her voice came from right next to him. She floated up to the window sill and sat on it so that her back was to the sea. Red hair whipped her arms until she wrestled it to one side with uncharacteristic impatience. "I am asking you to confide in me."

With a heavy sigh he jumped up on the sill to join her, though he sat so that his legs dangled out in the open air instead of in his room. A mile of emptiness stretched between his bare feet and the sliver of rocky island below, and another mile stretched up between his chilled face and the churning mass of storm clouds. Raindrops sprayed the water below but none reached them here at the window. He could feel Starfire's wide, expectant eyes on him.

"Can you keep this between us?" he asked.

"I solemnly swear."

Beast Boy met her eyes for a moment and decided to throw caution out the window and trust her. After all, if he didn't talk to someone about this he was going to lose his mind. Starfire seemed a pretty good candidate right now.

"Ever since the bank I've felt… off. Whenever Raven's not there, it's like there's this hole where she's supposed to be." He broke off laughing at how corny that sounded. But Starfire didn't laugh, so he forced himself to continue on, and didn't add that it felt like a black hole that was slowly pulling him in. Like the little voice in the back of his head that urged him to jump when he looked down from high places. "It's just weird."

Even now, that voice was the gravity pulling on his legs, whispering to fly. _L'appel du vide_ , Raven had observed once during patrol when he'd lingered at the edge of a skyscraper for a second too long. _The call of the void._ He'd been surprised then that she'd known exactly what he was thinking. She must have felt it too.

"What is weird?" Starfire prompted, pulling Beast Boy from his reverie.

He dragged his hand down his face. "Everything, Star. It's all… it's all _wrong_. I mean, as heroes we put our lives on the line all the time, and I always figured if I was gonna die it'd be in some great big battle or something. A martyr. Something for the history books. Not like _that_." The memory of shock coursed through him, the pain, the panic, the sheer unexpectedness, and his hand moved involuntarily to his stomach as the phantom pain flared up. "Out of nowhere. I wasn't ready. I always figured I'd have enough time to do everything I wanted. To tell people what I wanted to tell them."

"People like friend Raven?"

Beast Boy rubbed the back of his neck shyly. For an alien from alien culture, Starfire certainly was perceptive. "Well…" He contemplated denying it but didn't. "Yeah." The rueful smile returned and he kicked his feet in the breeze. "I said some stuff to her," he admitted quietly, thinking of the rush of emotion he'd thrown at her as he touched her cheek, "when I thought I was dying. Stuff I never would've had the guts to say otherwise. In the wake of all this crazy spell trouble we haven't even talked about it."

He rapped his head against the side of his window, wishing he could go back in time and prevent any of this from ever happening. In a small patch of stars the crescent moon was briefly in full sight, but already the clouds were devouring it again. As quickly as it came, it was gone.

"I don't regret it, but…" He took a deep breath to voice the fear that was eating him alive. "I'm scared that she does."

That was it. The possibility that had haunted him since the moment he woke up in the med bay. More than the phantom pain and more than the troublesome link that somehow remained between them.

 _I'm scared that she wishes she never learned that I love her._

.

.

Raven was levitating in front of her window when Cyborg knocked on her door. For the hundredth time since the bank she had been trying unsuccessfully to meditate. The steady waterfall of rain on the windowpane was simultaneously soothing and distracting, so that when the knock came Raven's eyes snapped open as if from sleep. When she opened the door she immediately tried to close it again. But Cyborg pushed his way inside. It was a testament to how serious he was, because Cyborg normally respected her self-imposed solitude more than anyone else in the tower.

She glowered at him, waiting for him to apologize for the rude intrusion. Instead, he said, "Why don't we sit down."

"Oh joy," Raven deadpanned, "more therapy time."

Cyborg merely smiled and picked up the crumpled piece of paper just inside the doorway. "Not here as your therapist, Rave, just as your friend." Taking in the picture as he unraveled the paper, he began to chuckle heartily. "Were you coloring?"

"Star's idea." Raven rolled her eyes and resumed her lotus position at the window, opting to ignore Cyborg's presence in the hopes he would take the hint and go away.

"Listen… Star and I overheard you and B outside the commons, and whatever you guys are going through, you don't have to go through it alone."

The rain reminded her of static. She wished she could turn up the sound to drown out everything else in the world.

"If you really overheard us, then you would know that we do."

Rustling sounds forced Raven into turning back around, only to see Cyborg had busied himself picking up the books strewn all around her carpet. As he inspected an open one she closed it with her powers and he didn't try to look again. "This mind link problem," he continued. "It's not the only problem you and B are having."

Raven bristled. "You say that like it's a fact."

"Well it is a fact," Cyborg shrugged. "You've been moody and anxious and short-tempered ever since the accident, and you can't attribute all of that to this 'mindscape' thing. Not to mention you've been hovering around the green bean like he's still dying." Cyborg dumped an armful of books on Raven's nightstand and scratched his jaw. "What's that all about? Why don't you tell me what's up? Nothing you say is leaving this room."

"You'll just turn around and tell Robin I need therapy after all."

"No I won't," he insisted. "Just get it off your chest. It can't hurt."

"Fine," Raven snapped, "you really want to know why I've been hovering over Beast Boy? It's because when he's not there I get this irrational fear that he's gone somewhere I'll never be able to reach him." Embarrassed that she'd let more slip out than she'd meant to, she turned back to the window and enforced a small detachment from the conversation before she went on. "Normally I meditate to alleviate irrational emotions. It helps separate myself from the world around me. But... the more I meditate, the worse this one gets." Exponentially. "I know it's just lingering fear from what happened at the bank, but still. There it is."

"Raven…" She glared, daring him to express any kind of pity. His expression changing from one of sympathy to something more pragmatic and he took a seat on her bed. "That's a perfectly normal thing to feel post-trauma."

No, he didn't understand at all. She shook her head. "It's more than that. Beast Boy's lingering pain scares me, and the fact that our mindscapes are somehow still connected lends credence to the idea that I failed somehow. I can't help the feeling that I messed up and didn't heal him properly, like if I let him out of my sight too long the injury will come back and kill him. Even now as we speak I'm anxious."

A bark of laughter caused her to stare with incredulity. But Cyborg was unapologetic, and crossed the room to clap Raven on the shoulder. "Now we're getting somewhere," he proclaimed. "What you described to me just now is nothing more than separation anxiety. All that means is that you care about him! Ain't nothin' wrong with that."

Raven huffed at the amused twinkle in Cyborg's eye, feeling dreadfully over-exposed. She shrugged away from his touch. "You're not getting it. He and I _need_ to separate, that's the problem here. We've gotten too close." _Way_ too close.

Nudging a book on the carpet with his mechanical foot, Cyborg hit her with a skeptical look. "What did your books have to say about it?"

"Nothing," she admitted, "so I'll have to deal with it myself. I have an idea that I think might work." The idea she was brewing was borderline insanity but she was out of rational options. She _had_ to sever herself from Beast Boy. The sooner the better. The idea of this situation escalating any further terrified her more in more ways than she would ever admit.

"I get you, Rave." Cyborg turned to the door. "Just don't do anything you'll regret, okay?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" she asked after him, but Cyborg said nothing, and left her in the shadows.

* * *

 _continue in part vii . . ._


	7. pilot light

Sorry for the long delay. Two more chapters to go after this one. The path obscures...

* * *

 _part vii_ _ㅡ_ _pilot light_

* * *

For a long time Raven sat unmoving. Hands tensed on her knees, the tail of her cape pooled on the carpet below her crossed legs, she had given up all hope of restful meditation. _Don't do anything you'll regret, okay?_

What did Cyborg mean by that? Did he know what she intended to do?

When she stood, darkness had completely overtaken the bay. Whether the day's end was actually here or the storm had brought a premature false night to the west coast was for someone else to guess. Raven did not know what time it was. She hadn't bothered to look at the face of a clock in three days.

In an uncharacteristic display of anxiety and uncertainty, Raven paced her room. She duly avoided looking at the object on her dresser, the current subject of her indecision. Lightning cracked somewhere offshore and etched her long shadow onto the far wall. She clutched her arms around her waist as the lightning flashed twice, and thrice; the black figure on her gray wall looked haggard and gaunt, perched between her decorative figurines like it too was lifeless stone. Like it belonged. Why was this so hard?

When she picked up the silver handheld mirror it was with a shaking hand. _Deep breath_. _Control your emotions._ Why was this so hard? Lightning flashed again deep within the mirror's reflection as she held it up to regard her own face at close range. Purple crescents dug canyons under her eyes and she closed them for a moment, dismayed to see how plainly her distress was written on her face. Her forehead came to rest on the mirror. The polished surface was glacial to the touch.

 _Deep breath. Just get this over with._

Raven held the mirror out at arm's length, her face hardening into the emotionless mask it had practiced so well. The plan was not well thought out, she could admit that (if only to herself). But what other choice did she have? Travelling into her own mindscape would hopefully give her access to the base of the problem, whatever or wherever it may be. She would root Beast Boy out of there with brute force if she had to. It was for the best. They couldn't live this way.

She told herself again. _It's for the best._

And then she reached forward, her hand glittering in the dark with the energy that would take her through the mirror's portal into her mind. But instead of touching the smooth surface her hand went straight through.

For a second she stared in shock. Then she recoiled her hand, gasping. Thinking it was just a mistake (she had to have been mistaken) she flared up her hand with energy once more, double the amount this time, and tried to touch the mirror. Her fingers pushed through the glass like it didn't existㅡlike she was nothing more than a ghost. The next flash of lightning startled her after an eternity of staring at her fingers poised halfway through the mirror, and in her surprise she dropped it.

Her reaction was swift but although she sent an immediate burst of energy toward it, her powers failed to stay its fall and it smacked the edge of the dresser on the way down, shattering into a thousand refracted pieces that reflected nothing at all. Raven's arms were still frozen, outstretched. It was as if someone had punched her in the gut. Winded her. Injured her.

Her mirror. Her mirror was broken…

She did not know when she had kneeled on the ground, but shards of glass were cutting into her bare knees. The dented silver frame had one or two angled shards still sticking out from the inner rim. Briefly, something flickered across the tiny reflection and Raven turned sharply to the window. Beyond the glass the lonely cry of a seabird rang out through the torrential rain.

Raven used her powers to open the window, and leaned out. There was nothing there.

She put her hood back on as she leaned back inside and slid the window shut manually, and turned around to find that the lights had gone out in her bedroom.

All was dark.

.

A gust of wind ruffled Beast Boy's hair. He lifted his face from his hands to see Starfire completing a backflip from the windowsill into the open air, her body half-vanishing into the drizzle and mist. He quirked an eyebrow at her, but she only giggled. The sound drifted past his perked ears like bells tinkling in the dark. A siren hiding in the rocks. Through the rain her eyes shone sure and strong, and they thinned into crescents as she smiled and beckoned him from his seat at the edge.

Oh.

Transforming into an osprey, he gave his wings a hesitant flap. Was it really wise to go flying in this weather? But Starfire performed another elaborate twirl and won him over before he had enough time to properly second guess the idea.

Ever since the bank he'd felt caged, and nothing could beat the moment he spread his wings and dove from his window, quickly catching an updraft. They circled each other five or six times in an impromptu game of tag until Starfire broke free and soared away toward the windows of the eleventh floor, avoiding a collision only at the last moment with a sharp turn, her eyes reflecting eerily all along the black glass. Water pelted Beast Boy's feathers and the wind kept him fluttering in a beeline as he advanced skyward, fighting against the very thing that was keeping him aloft. Yet despite the wet chill he felt _free_. He could no longer remember what had so recently been upsetting him. He couldn't remember the feeling of sorrow, or pain. Hell, he couldn't even remember his name. There were only the elements and his place among them.

The steady downpour rang with the sudden cry of a seabird, alien and wrong at a time when all other seabirds were roosting in the cliffs and farther ashore, and Starfire's neon eyes shone his way one last time before disappearing beyond the far side of the building.

.

.

The lightswitch in her room did nothing but spark when she touched it, and Raven quickly found that the lights in the corridor had gone out as well.

"Cyborg," she spoke into the stillness, repeating it a few more times before giving up and retrieving her communicator from her nightstand. But when she clicked it on, all she got was static and more static, and after some fiddling with the settings it shut off completely and refused to turn back on.

"Oh joy," she said aloud to herself. Perfect time for her communicator to go haywire.

At the end of the hall she found that not only had the lights gone out, but that the elevators had also decided to quit working. That was when she decided she'd better take a look at the circuit breaker herself. If anything Cyborg would probably be down there already, and he may need a hand if the problem proved any nastier than a blown fuse.

She opened a portal to the bottommost underground level of the tower where all the electrical and hydraulic systems were housed, only to see that it was about as navigable as an unlit mine and devoid of any other Titans.

Where was Cyborg?

Back up in the common room, Raven's eyes finally began adjusting to the dark. Here it was easier to see, with the spanning glass walls that let in whatever subdued light shone through the rain from the city across the bay. It wasn't much but it was enough to distinguish the shapes of furniture and the silhouette of her arms as she felt her way toward the kitchen.

It was only as she found the emergency kit in the back of the pantry with the candles and flashlights that she belatedly realized not only had the power gone out, but neither of the emergency generators had kicked on. Where was Cyborg, and Robin for that matter? Where _was_ everyone?

She spilled the contents of the kit onto the counter, rifling through them blindly, clicking each flashlight one by one, growing increasingly discouraged as she found them each in turn to be dead. The last one clicked on and for just a moment she thought it would work, but the fluorescent light sputtered and died, and no manner of jostling the batteries would rekindle it. From a forgotten drawer of the emergency kit she managed to unearth a lighter, but no matter how she tried she couldn't get any of the candles to light. Each time the flame caught it would flicker and shrink until all that remained was the ever decaying wick and a thin plume of smoke. They flickered like a wind was blowing them out, and one by one as she lit them they would darken. The kitchen filled with the scent of burning candles but none remained lit long enough to lighten the gloom.

A chill ran over Raven then, and she found herself wishing that one of her friends would show themselves. She was not afraid of the dark, but she was afraid of _this_ dark. The mirror shattered again in her memory and she shook her head to drive away the noise, fingers tightening around the lighter.

She brought it with her from the kitchen to the common room, keeping her thumb pressed tightly on the catch. The bug-sized flame wavered as she walked, but the stream of gas was steady and it did not go out, giving her the unsettling feeling that she was holding the tower's pilot light itself _ㅡ_ that if she let it go out there would never be lights here again. As she felt her way past the couch she called out for each of her teammates in turn. There came no echo, and no reply. The dark ate her words. At the immense window on the other end of the room she could make out her ghostly reflection; the faint orange slivers denoting her arm and neckline and hood in the dim firelight were smeared by the inconstant stream of water on the panes of glass.

And then, past the glass, past the blanket of rain, something moved.

Raven raised her lighter to see but it proved unnecessary because a fresh batch of lightning etched the shape of the bird into the night sky. It cried out and seemed to look her way. The entire shape of the room twisted and changed with the passage of the bird's shadow, and only as the lightning faded did she realize that it was green.

 _Beast Boy._

Without thinking she phased herself through the window to give chase.

.

 _._

Around and around the tower Beast Boy pursued Starfire, but he could no longer see her green eyes or hear her laughter, and the beginnings of anxiety had begun to butterfly in his stomach. Rain pelted him. It blinded him worse than the darkness and weighed down his wings until they threatened to go numb with cold. This didn't feel like an aimless game of tag anymore. He'd almost made up his mind to go retrieve his communicator and ring Star to make sure she hadn't gotten lost or something, when a dark figure emerged out of the rain ahead of him.

It wasn't Starfire, it was Raven. He swerved around her, squawking his confusion, but she only pointed vehemently groundward. Any idiot would understand what she wanted.

A few feet above the ground he transformed back, shaking out his hair like a dog. "What'sㅡ "

She interrupted. "What are you doing out here? Where are you going? Something's terribly amiss and now is not the timeㅡ "

"Calm down!" Beast Boy reeled, taking in Raven's frazzled state. She made no effort to keep her hood up in the face of the howling wind, and her eyes were wide, her pupils dilated. "I was only going for a quick flight with Star," he soothed. What could have gotten her so worked up? "You didn't see her did you? I kinda lost her."

"Starfire? No, I… I didn't see her. I haven't seen anyone. The power went out in the tower and my communicator is dead. I can't get any flashlights to work and I can't find anyone and I broke my mirror, Beast Boy, _I broke my mirror_ …"

"Woah, woah!" Gently he pried her hands away from the sides of her head, and as she got ahold of her breath the wet rocks stopped rattling around their feet. This was a lot to take in. "Everything's alright. The power's not out, Rae." She mumbled something under her breath that sounded venomously sarcastic. He huffed, halfway between exasperated and sympathetic. "It's not. Look up."

After a moment she did as he suggested. Together they surveyed the tower, which resembled an oil painting in the veil of the storm. Yellow lights dotted the side of the building in shining broken bands, concentrated most in the center of the tower near the top, where the common room was.

"See?" he nudged. "Everything's cool."

But instead of reassuring her, his words broke her. Raven sank down onto the pebbly shore and brought her knees to her chest. "Everything is most certainly not cool."

Easing down next to her, he crossed his legs and tried to be the levelheaded one. It felt wrong. Raven was supposed to be the one who knew what was going on. But she was lost and confused, and where did that leave him?

"So your mirror broke, huh?" Silence, and raindrops. "You were trying to go into your mindscape?"

Raven lowered her knees and raised her head, appraising him with an emotion in her eyes that he couldn't quite name. His confession to Starfire resounded in his head. _I'm scared that she wishes she never learned that I love her._

"I'm at the end of my rope," Raven admitted defensively. _Guilt_ , he realized belatedly. She felt guilty. "I'm at a loss. I'm out of ideas."

"The fat lady hasn't sung yet. Let's go over this one more time, step by step. What was the initial plan?"

Raven shrugged, like she was no longer sure what the plan had ever been. "To enter a shared healing state."

With patience, Beast Boy nodded. "And how were we supposed to do that?"

Raven shrugged again. "Simple enough in theory. I induce my own meditative state while healing you. My mind was blank and ideally yours would have been too." She trailed off, turning an oblong rock over and over in the sand with her powers. "But of course... I had no way to communicate that. You were already nearly gone."

The last memory he had of the incident at the bank reared its head, lashing out at him. The single-minded determination as he removed his bloody glove. The sudden elation as he tossed all misgivings into the fire and brought his hand to her face. The nuclear burn of every emotion he'd ever felt about her, and her sudden gasp as it all washed over her. And even though he'd been dying, he knew then that she understood. She knew what it meant. She knew what it was.

 _Come on, get ahold of yourself._

Raven side-eyed him as he drew a shuddering breath. That memory still paralyzed him.

It was with great trepidation that he spoke. "Yeah, I don't think my mind was blank when we went under, Raven." She didn't respond, and he felt compelled to voice the loaded question they were both wondering. "You think maybe I messed it up making you feel my emotions first?"

There was no indication she had even heard him, save for her right hand tightening over something small she'd been clutching.

A little piece of hope that had trudged on through the battlefield fractured inside him. "Are we still not talking about this?"

Her knuckles turned white. "I… can't."

Beast Boy exhaled slowly and leaned back on his hands, sliding a bit in the mud. "Can't, or won't?"

" _Can't,"_ she barked, bitterly. She bit her lip right after she said it, but didn't take it back. She turned to him, imploringly, but would not say anything else.

"Yeah, yeah I get it." He really did. Just because he was an optimist didn't mean he was stupid. "I mean, I always wanted to tell you but there was a reason I kept it a secret, you know. This was it."

"Beast Boy, it's not because I don'tㅡ"

"Stop. Justㅡ" He raised a hand but let it drop again. "It's alright. Look… you said you were out of ideas, right? Well, I have an idea if you want it. It's a pretty shitty last-ditch-effort kind of idea but, honestly, I think we're there."

Her whispered "What?" was almost inaudible.

Holding his hand out in the rain, he let it pool in his palm, working up the courage to answer her. After a minute of this, Raven put her hand on his wrist. He dropped it again, but Raven didn't take hers away, her fingers still brushing his skin in a supportive sort of way. A friendly way. A tender way. It killed him.

"I think we need to separate."

Raven's answer was almost a scoff. "Yes, that's the general idea."

Beast Boy rolled his eyes. "No, Rae, I mean we should _physically_ separate. We've spent a helluva lot of time together since the accident. I mean… look at us." He met her eyes pointedly, and it seemed to dawn on her that she was still touching his wrist. They were inches apart. "Maybe in order to sever this thing we need to create some actual space," he suggested sadly. "Let physics do the rest, y'know?"

Raven tapped her finger on her leg, mulling it over. "That… it's a long shot." She opened her other hand, and Beast Boy realized the thing she'd been clutching so forcefully was a lighter. Looking at it, she shivered. "It may actually work though. It's worth trying."

Well. That was that. Beast got to his feet, brushing some of the mud and grainy sand from his uniform. "Okey dokey then." He gave her a halfhearted peace sign and smile. "See you around, Rae." Before he could say anything stupid he transformed into a salamander, darting away toward the crashing surf.

 _Hang on,_ he heard her calling. _Wait. Beast Boy, wait!_

He only stopped when a spray of sand caught him, sending him stumbling back into humanity. He glared at the culprit. " _What?"_

"Are you serious?" She caught up to him, looking like she wanted to spray him with sand a second time for good measure. "If anyone is going to leave it'll be me, Beast Boy, you're still recovering!"

He pressed his hand to his stomach defensively. It still hurt, but he wasn't about to admit that. "What?" he laughed, a little too loudly. "No way. I've been itching to get off this island for almost three days. Plus, it was my idea. I'll be the one to go." Honestly, after the pained way she said _can't_ , he didn't think he could face her in the daylight for a long time yet. The truth hurt. He wanted to leave.

He turned to the ocean again but tripped when she grabbed his arm. "Don't," she blurted. "I'm rethinking this plan. It could only take a moment, but what if it takes more? Much more? It could be days, weeks…" Her words hung in the frosty seaspray, implying everything else. Months. Years. A lifetime.

Brushing her hand off was hard to do, but he did. "You gonna miss me?" he joked. But he might as well have just said goodbye. She pressed her lips into a thin line and blinked away rain from her lashes. There was no question in her eyes, no innocence. Only resignation. It reminded him of someone he once knew, long ago when he was just a kid, and so he said what his mother had said to him back then when he was the one making that expression. A lie to soften the truth. "Hey, chin up, songbird," and tapped her chin with his knuckle. "I'll come back."

Raven only looked away. "Would you blame me for not believing you?"

"No."

She shoved away his hand. "So don't go."

Beast Boy could only sigh. "You know I have to." He stepped back, the soles of his shoes slipping in the rocks. A stray wave splashed at his ankles. "But…" He gambled one last glance at her. "If there's anything you want to tell me, this might be your last chance."

"You know I can't."

"Yeah."

The tower loomed behind her, silver and yellow in the night. He splashed into the water and dove in as a trout, letting the waves carry him away from the island toward the other side of the bay, toward the city, toward land.

.

.

Raven stood alone on the shore, watching a faint green dolphin as it leapt from the sea a hundred yards out. This couldn't be happening. She should go get him. There had to be another way to solve this that wasn't so extreme. Her thumb clicked the lighter again and again compulsively, and even in the rain it would light for a moment each time. But gradually it grew fainter and fainter until a raindrop landed directly on the flame, and then it would light no more.

The lighter fell to the sand where it began to sink and was swallowed by the next crashing wave.

With a heavy heart Raven turned to go back inside, to let everyone know what had transpired. But when she turned around she was hit with such a shock that the boulder beside her rent in half with a deafening crack. There were no yellow lights anymore, nothing shining inside her home, no sign of life at all. Vines grew rampant and the windows were broken and the doors had caved in and whole sections of the tower had rotted away to reveal rusted metal. A thousand years had come to pass here and even as she looked up in abject horror another beam somewhere within crumbled, and the tower creaked as far above her bricks fell away.

This wasn't real. It wasn't…

She leapt out of the way of the waterfall of bricks at the last moment, scraping her arms on another pile of rubble.

Maybe she had no clue what was happening anymore, what was real and what wasn't, but she knew one thing for sure. She should never have let Beast Boy leave. Whatever was happening was her fault, and hers alone. Gathering herself up from the shore, Raven centered herself, fresh cuts bleeding, drenched cloak billowing in the wind. She centered herself, and found that she knew exactly what she had to do. She must bring him back.

At any cost.

* * *

 _continue in part viii . . ._

* * *

Next chapter: _lighthouse_

We're coming up on the climax here, folks. See you next time!


	8. lighthouse

Please feel free to scream whatever you want at me after this chapter ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

* * *

 _part viii ㅡ lighthouse_

* * *

Beast Boy swam. Sometimes he was helped onward by the current, sometimes he fought against it, and all the while, a few meters above him the storm raged on. He was the only life form in the water not hugging the seafloor. After a hundred waves had swept him by he began to wonder how close to the mainland he'd comeㅡafter all, their island wasn't that far out and dolphins were swift. He should have washed up on the beach by now.

Lightheadedness pounced on him without warning and for a moment he was lost in a wave. Had he been under that long already? Maybe he should go up for a breath.

But when he surfaced, blowing water high into the air, the fuzzy feeling like oxygen deprivation didn't fade and he saw no evidence he'd come any closer to the mainland. There were no lights on the other side of the rain to announce the skyscrapers, no marquee strips to outline the bridge, no bouncing ships to betray the end of the pier. Back the way he'd come, he could no longer see the telltale lights of the tower. A pang of unease hit him then. Had he gone the wrong way?

No, he'd gone east from the island so he should have come up quickly on the shore.

Transforming into an osprey once more he took to the sky, beating his wings against the rain to ascend toward black, electric clouds. His vision turned grainy and the fuzzy feeling spread to his limbs, numbing the push of his wings. But still higher he flew, certain that if he could breach the cloud canopy and see precisely where the moon hung in the sky he could determine if he'd gone the wrong direction. _Just keep going._ Droplets of water condensed and froze on his wings, and the clouds refused to end no matter how high he flew. When they finally did end, when he emerged from the last wisps of gray into the silver bath of stars, it was to the brightest flash of pain he'd ever known. A hot iron like an arrow through his stomach. Pain so acute it screamed of death.

Down he spiralled, back through the clouds, into the rain, flapping his wings but unable to control them for the agony. The raindrops beside him waxed red. He folded his wings to his chest and shut his eyes and the ocean yawned to swallow him.

The storm raged on.

Raven gave up shouting his name within the first few minutes of her search. Even if she had a megaphone he surely couldn't hear her through the crash of the surf and the roar of the deluge as the tidal forces collided. She was sure he'd come this way but though she flew for what seemed like hours she never saw any lights looming in the distance, nor saw any evidence at all that she was coming up on the shoreline. Could _she_ have come the wrong way?

No, she was sure she'd gone east. Toward land. Of course she'd gone east.

In desperation, she muttered her mantra to herself, extending mental feelers in every which direction. She felt the little sparks of the many thousands of life forms living below her. One by one she filtered them out: the fish and the shrimp, the slow heartbeats of turtles, the haze of the plants rooted deep within the reef, the brighter glow that had to have been some kind of whale, or a dolphin, or a… a flutter of familiarity.

She sped down toward the water, shoving away an oncoming wave with her own wave of energy. He wasn't here. He was…

Panic welled up and she pushed away the rest of the sea too, descending into the water in an unnatural well, a dark whirlpool that followed her all the way down until she finally saw him, his shirt stuck on an outcropping of turquoise brain coral. Raindrops splashed down the face of the coral for the first time in its history, washing Beast Boy's blood down, pooling it deep into the crevices. His wound had reopened and he was unconscious.

Raven's well of energy faltered as she diverted some of it to wrenching the saltwater from Beast Boy's lungs, and without warning the well closed over them, leaving only a small bubble of air and darkness on the coral landscape to protect them from the crushing weight of the ocean above them. Released from her grip, the pinkish water spilled on the coral and Beast Boy sprang to life, spluttering, choking, rasping, clutching his chest. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't… He noticed the blood staining his uniform first, and remembered the sudden pain that had shot him from the sky. But he wasn't feeling it now. Why?

" _ㅡ_ _were you thinking?"_ he heard distantly. He focused past the ringing noise in his ear on Raven, who was pressing her hands to his stomach, radiant with power. "You should have come back when you feltㅡI never should haveㅡ" She pulled her hands away to slam two fists on the coral. Her powers had no effect whatsoever on his injury, and he continued to bleed. Was she really there or was he hallucinating her presence as he drowned?

"Thinking?" he repeated absently. "I was thinking it was working, Rae, cause it was." Outside the bubble of air that encompassed them, the silhouettes of a hundred fish lurked, lured by the smell of blood in the water. They scattered when a darker silhouette emerged behind them, turning until all ten feet of it were in full view: a hammerhead shark. "Something was changing," he told her, fumbling for a way to phrase it. "I could feel it. I was almost there."

"No." For some reason his word choice put her on edge. "This was stupid; we can't approach it this way." She heaved a shuddering breath, pressing on his wound to try and stop the bleeding the old fashioned way. " _Obviously."_

Beast Boy collapsed further onto the coral, eyeing the shark as it circled overhead with the patience of carrion. It crossed his mind that Raven's eyesight was nowhere near as keen as his and that she was as good as blind down here. "Or maybe it was right," he muttered. "Maybe this is just how it should've happened in the first place. Maybe you weren't meant to save me and if we wanna separate then that means I have to bite the dust."

"Stop." Her outburst fractured the coral and they both lurched in place, grasping for handholds and finding none. "I can't," she insisted. Everything was dark and she couldn't see a damn thing.

"Hey." He spoke softly. "It's okay. Everyone's gotta die sometime or another, y'know?"

"I can't…"

"Maybe we went against fate." He'd never really believed in fate until he wished on a green shooting star for a friend and instead of one found four. Now he wasn't so sure. Maybe some events drew people in like inescapable gravity. Maybe some things really were meant to be. "Time to let go, yeah?"

"I can't!" she screamed, shoving his arms away, grabbing hold of his collar. "Iㅡ" The bubble of energy burst; a spectacular spray of water collapsed onto the rooftop, spreading out and splashing off the sides, taking fish and seaweed alike with it over the edge of the tower. It thinned into a shallow pool at their ankles and Beast Boy wheeled in a full circle in his surprise. They were on the rooftop. Somehow. Reef fish scattered in every direction, the bigger ones floundering against the air ducts, and near the empty helipad the hammerhead flopped over and over in the leftover saltwater.

Beast Boy rested his hands on Raven's where they still clutched his collar, shaking. "Hey," he nudged. Gently. Delicately. "Let go, okay? It's gonna be alright."

Raven's head was down, and her hair obscured her face from him. He wondered if she was about to yell again, but was shocked when she spoke in a calm, even tone. "When I was a child, Azar told me that one day I would experience the greatest of pains and feel nothing at all. But when you wereㅡwhen you were dying, instead of nothing I felt _everything_. I was never supposed to feel that way. You don't get it. All my teachings…" She furrowed her eyebrows in determination, still refusing to look up from her hands. "But I do. I'm not letting go because I _can't_ , Beast Boy, I can't do it. I can't go through that again."

"Rae, come on. You have to let me go. It's time."

His voice was muffled and far away and Raven snapped to attention, startled. She stood in front of her dresser, her mirror at arms length, one hand poised halfway through the reflective glass. Her reflection blinked back at her. "Raven?" Several sharp knocks rapped on her door in quick succession and she retracted her hand like the mirror had burned her.

The knocking at the door started up again. The voice came through clear as day, sharp as knives. "Let go!" he barked, " _Niache!_ " And the mirror shattered in her hand.

Glass rebounded on the carpet and sent tiny flecks of light speeding across the walls. Raven clutched the empty silver frame to her chest, squeezing her eyes shut, wishing to just wake up.

"This is my room," she told him through gritted teeth. "You can't tell me what to do here, Beast Boy."

On the other side of the door she heard him sigh and lean against the doorframe. "You don't know what you're talking about," he answered. "That's not where we are."

The mirror was torn from her hand then and when she lunged forward to catch it she saw not her mirror, but a rope, a thick frayed rope sliding off the edge of a dock into placid green water. An unseen animal cackled in the canopy above, and Beast Boy smiled at her ruefully from the one-man rowboat, giving her a short, bittersweet wave as it began to drift untethered from the dock.

But the river here was sure and slow. Raven hopped off the dock into the water to wade out through the tickling reeds to the rowboat, easily slipping aboard, dripping water onto the freshly sanded wood.

"You can't come with me," he argued, angry that she was still here. She shouldn't be here.

Raven brooded in silence, watching the jungle slip past them; tree by tree, the river carried them downstream. Beneath the glassy water fireflies flitted unnaturally amongst the fish, and far off in the jungle there were lanterns burning, following them in parallel at a great distance. Somewhere between here and there, someone was dancing in the trees, humming a song that stung with its intimacy. Swahili and dandelion seeds swirled around them on a breeze and Beast Boy dipped one hand into the water, carving a ravine in the rivertop. "It means I loved her," he said.

"What?" Raven tore her eyes from the shadowed dancers, rimmed in the yellow of distant fires.

"Kupendwa. You asked what it meant. It means _I loved her._ "

Raven settled back into her side of the boat. Her eyes drifted gradually back to the dancers. "Oh."

"My parents used to sing it, a long time ago. You hear it too, right?" He cocked his head at her, contemplating for the first time that the song might be only in his head.

But Raven nodded. The words of the song seemed to be rising from the river itself. Popping around them like bubbles. Scattering like sparks. _Alizaliwa tarehe upepo..._

" _Born on the wind,"_ he translated, brushing dandelion seeds off the bow of the boat.

" _flowers in her eyes, I loved her, in secret, I loved her."_ She tried to catch his eye but his gaze was somewhere far, far away. " _I loved her, in secret, I loved her."_

As he spoke, the dancers slipped impossibly between the trees and the lanterns grew faint. " _It's not the storm I fear, off the shore of my island home, but the bird who went fishing_

 _alone there. Alone there."_

His voice grew faint too. " _I loved her, I loved her, sweet island songbird, I loved her. I flew through the rain to tell her. I loved her."_

Then, unexpectedly, the fat trunks thinned and the underbrush stopped growing and they came upon an unexpected clearing in the forest. The river was rushing now, toward a clear edge which could only be a waterfall, and beyond that lay a vast yellow plain that seemed to extend forever in every direction. Great white clouds billowed up like mountains in the azure savannah sky, and the sun glared down at them from high noon, showering warmth. Beast Boy's hesitant smile twisted into alarm when Raven whispered, "Wow."

He straightened, jarred into instant alertness, and stood, rocking the boat as he dragged Raven up with him by the arm. "You need to go back," he declared, turning away from the looming waterfall. "You can't come with me."

Raven stood her ground as the unbalanced boat threatened to capsize. "I can," she argued, "and it looks like I'm about to."

The bow tipped beyond the point of no return. "No you're not." The boat tipped forward but he tackled her off the stern and together they plunged into the icy river.

Underwater they pushed and shoved, grappling with each other as the current scraped them up and down the riverbed, until Raven stopped fighting him to cough a plume of bubbles. He seized her hand then and kicked off from the rocks, seeking air. He swam and swam and everything grew dark, and he nearly blacked out before breaching the surface. Raven wheezed beside him, gasping for air. Rain blinded him and a wave washed over their heads, submerging them briefly.

"The Pacific again?" he spluttered, barely keeping his head above the salty water.

Underwater Raven's hand found his shirt and she dug her fingers into the fabric like it was a lifeline as she coughed. "Can you transform?"

"No, I don't think…"

"Come on." She pulled him along by the sleeve, half flying and half swimming, unable to clear the water and keep ahold of him simultaneously. Every cardinal direction was black and unpromising so she just went forward. "Where's a damn lighthouse when you need one?"

"Is any of this even _real?_ " Beast Boy wrenched her downward into the water to regain her attention. "Raven, am I _dead?_ Are _we_ dead?"

With her bravest face, she answered honestly. "I don't… I don't know. I've never died before. I don't know what happens."

Beast Boy choked back tears, grasping at her arms as yet another wave swelled between them. "You never should have tried to save me at the bank!"

"But Iㅡ"

"No, you didn't! Look where it got you! You're so stubborn. Jesus, Raven, if I'd known it'd get you killed along with me I never would have let you do that. Don't you get it? _I love you._ "

Raven blinked saltwater out of her eyes, gobsmacked. "What did you say?"

Beast Boy fiddled with his cufflinks self-consciously, fidgeting in his brand new tux. "I _said,_ I'm so happy to see you," Beast Boy repeated, louder. A string quartet played Vivaldi somewhere near the glass balcony doors and the whole ballroom hummed with the polite sounds of small talk and reserved laughter between other folks in black ties. "I know you said you wouldn't come to one of these if I threatened you at gunpoint but I always held out hope you'd come around. And here you are!"

"Well I, for one, am still hoping I come to my senses," Raven replied dryly.

She looked incredibly uncomfortable in the sparkly mermaid evening gown Starfire had undoubtedly stuffed her into (because there was no way she'd picked that irradiated moss color herself) but she may as well be wearing a garbage bag for all he cared. He was just happy to see her.

"You look like you hate that dress," he joked, "but you also look really… charming," he finished, chickening out on the word 'stunning.'

Raven looked away, unsure what to do with the compliment. She settled on an equally mystifying one. "And you look dapper." In her peripheral vision she saw his face split into a shit-eating grin but she was caught up on the group of women dancing nearby. Their dresses swished in slow motion and their faces blurred, their eyes catching the light like a lens flare, their laughter overlapping in a way that made her take a step back. Like a dream.

Beast Boy followed her gaze and drank in the half-remembered faces, the curve of the balcony beyond the grand archway as it faded away to nothing but glitchy stars and half a moon. Defeated, he tucked his hands in his pockets. "This isn't real, is it?"

"No," she confirmed. "A memory."

"Yeah." He grew quiet, tapping his foot to the quartet's lullabic concerto. The waxed marble shone so immaculately that they could see nearly see themselves in it. "This is the one where we didn't get to dance, right?"

Raven nodded. People blurred past, dancing, and Raven thought of a firepit on a boat. Beast Boy thought for a second he saw Robin and Starfireㅡat least, there was a flash of red hair, but then they were gone again, lost in the undulating crowd.

Beast Boy chuckled to himself. "Windsor Hall, right? I remember this. This was the last of those PR fundraisers Robin threw for building repair after the whole Trigon thing. Millionaires in suits came all the way from Timbuktu. I was so bored I wanted to drown myself in the punch bowl until you showed up." Raven finally looked back and realized he was watching her, leaning on a carved pillar. "I was glad you'd decided to come cause I'd finally worked up the courage to tell you how I felt." Raven's mouth fell open but Beast Boy only smirked sardonically, resting his hands behind his head in a manner entirely unbecoming of a man in a suit. "If we're really dead, then this must be hell," he laughed bitterly. "This is one of my worst memories."

Raven bowed her head, but was drawn up again as if by a homing beacon to a green sparkle across the room. "It's not your memory," she informed him reluctantly. "It's mine."

Beast Boy's arms fell to his sides as he saw what she was seeing. It was them. Across the room, they stood facing each other. He in his tux, she in her dress, they exchanged the hellos and the awkward compliments and he reddened when she plucked the price tag from his collar with her powers. The cellist went on alone as the music took a solemn turn, and Beast Boy sighed as he watched himself extend his hand to her on a night long since passed.

"It was perfect," he lamented, more to himself than to her, "and then…"

Across the ballroom floor, Raven had only just taken his hand when a little girl in a frilly black dress that was far too long for her reached up to tug on Beast Boy's sleeve.

"She was lost," Beast Boy narrated, remembering that little girl all too well. The puff to her cheeks and the shine in her eyes. "Needed help finding her parents. She saw my skin, recognized me, knew I was a superhero."

The vision of Beast Boy gave Raven a long, hard look before relinquishing her hand, and then crouched down to lift the little girl onto his shoulders. He shot upright, earning a loud girlish squeal from her, and took off bounding into the crowd to look for her parents. _Anyone lost a princess?_ he shouted, the memory of his voice jingling every crystal on the chandelier. _Anyone lost a princess with pigtails?_

"By the time I got back you were gone. You left and I never... That was when I decided never to tell you."

Raven stood stricken as if by a trance, watching the memory of him run off into the grayish haze. When he had faded from sight and sound completely, Beast Boy turned his attention back to the memory that was still playing outㅡto Ravenㅡand what he saw made his heart race.

The memory of Raven stood stricken in the exact same manner as her older counterpart. Her stance was slack, her mouth slightly ajar; it was evident she'd been caught off guard by something incredible. Confusion spread over her face, quickly followed by defiance, then fearㅡshe squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her hand to her chest, shaking her head in quiet disbelief.

A passing server in his neatly pressed cocktail shirt and bowtie passed by, taking notice of her distress. The man stopped to offer her a tall glass of bubbles from a silver platter, but when he tapped her shoulder Raven flinched and caused the glasses on the tray to implode with a spray of fizz. The server stumbled backwards, tripping and sending the platter and glass clattering on the marble. Raven reached forward as if to help him up, but brought her hands to her head and turned to flee instead, leaving the man to wobble to his feet, shoving her way through the dancers in her haste to get away.

Straight up Cinderella style. Beast Boy almost expected to see a glass shoe left behind.

Foggy servers closed in on the area to clean up the glass, and one shooed the younger Beast Boy away as he tried to return to the area. Looking somewhat lost he searched this way and that before rejection sank in and bowed his shoulders.

Over by the pillar, Beast Boy touched Raven's shoulder, causing her to start as violently as her memory had done. "Raven…" He was almost scared to ask but he had to know. "What did I just witness? What happened to you that day?"

Retreating a few steps, Raven blinked at him as curiously as she had the very first time she'd laid eyes on him on that dark street corner. "That's why," she whispered. "That must be why we're here." Looking back at the patch of marble she'd fled from years ago, she mumbled to herself, deaf to Beast Boy's continued questioning. "This memory, this was the moment when I realized that I…" She peered at him oddly and he was stunned to recognize comprehension kindling deep in her eyes, lighting quickly into a blaze of determination. "That's it!"

Beast Boy stepped closer, closing the space she'd opened, thrown by the turn the conversation had taken. "What are you saying?"

"Of course," she whispered, and devolved into muttering inaudibly to herself, one finger tapping on her cheek. "And you knew it all along too," she said, "god, you were right."

"I wasㅡwait, I was right? About what?"

"A two-way street." She seized his shoulders then, and with a fizzling noise the entire memory of the ballroom pulsed. "You said this was a two-way street. _You were right_."

At that he cringed. "You mean when we were fighting over which memories we saw?" There had to have been a better way to handle that argument than shouting that at her.

With single-mindedness Raven plowed on past the question. "The problem was never because you didn't clear your mind, it was because I cleared mine. I was trying to let you in but all I succeeded in doing was to shut you out. It really was my fault all along. I messed this up, Garfield, but I think I finally figured out how to fix it. I know what to do now."

"Hey," he smirked weakly, feeling a bit wobbly under her iron grip on his arms. "You called me Garfield again."

A light blush touched her cheeks and she loosened her grip, her eyelashes fluttering in a shy feminine manner that was almost as rare a sight as her smiles. "I know. Look… can you do something for me?"

"Yeah," he assured her, quailing under the raw vulnerability in her voice. "Anything."

"We're gonna try again, except I need you to feel my emotions too this time around."

Beast Boy quickly quelled his involuntary bubble of laughter. "Come on, you know I don't know how to do that."

She took one shuddery breath, then brought his hand to her face. He stared blankly as she guided his palm to rest on her cheek and slowly relaxed. "We have to do this. Trust me. I'll do all the work," she said, and her voice was startlingly even for how nervous she looked. "You don't really have to do anything different, I suppose. Just…" she paused, stumbling over the next few words, "feel what you always feel about me."

"So… love?" he prodded lightly.

"Yes," she breathedㅡand the breath seemed to come from her entire body, like she was letting go of the heaviest loadㅡ"love."

And the ballroom changed.

Grass erupted from the marble, cracking and splitting it into fragments. Sunlight shone from above and the chandelier was gone. There was only sun and sky and lazy clouds and all around it was summertime, everything lit in a solar flare of light, and he felt it all at once, all around him, warmer than any light should be yet softer than any snow. A soft breeze that whispered of comfort. _Comfort_. When he realized this bubble of comfort was how Raven felt about him, a wave of euphoria washed over him and he pressed his forehead to hers, feeling like maybe he could sing.

At his movement Raven tensed again. A new emotion overrode comfort, and it was one Beast Boy knew more intimately than most people did, so that he recognized it instantly. Hope! Nervous, shaky, and dim, but still unmistakably hope. He laughed, tears pricking his eyes. The feeling shifted thenㅡthe clouds raced and the sun rose and fell a hundred times a second and Raven allowed herself to meet his eyes and he was startled by the emergence of an emotion so strong it was blinding, one he hadn't expected to see here at all. It was _curiosity_. Boundless curiosity built like a ladderㅡa great endless ladder that stretched into the sky and beyond the moon. Her fingers brushed his hand.

So he made her curious, did he? A impish grin took him over and he snaked his free arm around her waist, determined to satisfy some of that curiosity once and for all.

"I change my mind," he said as he nudged her nose with his. "This couldn't possibly be hell." If this was hell then he wouldn't be about to kiss her.

But his lips had barely brushed hers when she gasped and flinched, violently, her fingers closing in a vice grip on his hand.

He pulled back immediately. "Raven?" Alarm coursed through him when he saw her eyes had gone glassy, and elevated into panic when he pulled his hand away to reveal a single red handprint. A bloody handprint. " _Shit_ ㅡRae, what'sㅡ" Coherent words stopped forming when he noticed the red stain all down the front of his tux, and down her dress. The blood was his though, right? It had to be, he was the one who'd been stabbed. But Raven was the one who was collapsing in his arms. "Shit!" he spat. He stumbled to his knees trying to slow her fall. Why couldn't he feel any pain? " _No no_ _no no no."_

"It's okay," she assured him, experimentally prodding her stomach with one finger and recoiling back with a sharp hiss. "It's okay, I understand what's happening."

"Well I don't," he cried, "I don't understand." The ballroom had gone dark and he could no longer see anything but her. A layer of blood and dust had settled on her uniform and her cloak was tangled with his legs and her hair.

"I can see them now," she said, looking over the edge of his shoulder.

"See what?" Beast Boy leaned closer, bringing his hand up under her neck to support it as she tried to sit upward toward whatever she was seeing. "What do you see, Rae?"

"Fireflies." She pointed behind him and when he turned to look he saw not fireflies, but a group a soft yellow lights floating around them in a circle. A ring of taper candles. Equidistant. As he looked they moved closer, closing in on them.

He tore his eyes from the candles, dread finding its way into his voice now. "Don't do this to me," he whispered, "not now. You gotta come back."

"I flew through the rain," she mumbled, "to tell you."

"So fly _back_ ," he pleaded, "fly back!"

This seemed to grab her attention and for a moment she was lucid. "It's alright," she told him, "there's a lighthouse on the shore." She saw his heart stop as she said this and the smallest of crooked smiles graced her face before she closed her eyes. "You remember. You were there, you remember."

"Yeah," he admitted. "I remember."

All around the candles closed in and Beast Boy barely registered that there were people holding them. Muffled voices began to ring in his ears but might as well have been deaf until there were hands on his shoulders. A familiar voice cut through then. _Are you alright?_

With detached confusion he looked up into Cyborg's concerned eyes. Starfire emerged from behind him, frantic and frazzled and puffy-faced, holding a candle of her own burned down to a wilting stub.

"Beast Boy!"

Everything was sharp and clear all at once. Robin's shout had snapped him out of a waking dream and he realized Robin was currently trying to coax his arms into letting go of Raven. "Don't touch her!" he growled, steeling his grip even further. "Don'tㅡ"

"You are awake!" Starfire gasped.

"What happened to her?" Robin asked. "What happened to _you?_ "

Beast Boy watched Raven's chest rise and fall, feeling weightless, like everything was upside down. That was a damn good fucking question. It was probably going to be a long time before he himself understood all that had transpired.

Ignoring the question out of a simple inability to answer it, Beast Boy struggled to his feet, lifting Raven's limp body as he went, cradling her to his chest. She'd never have stood for being carried this way if she'd been awake but she wasn't. She wasn't. He could feel her breathing and could see her lips moving faintly with the pattern of her mantra, and though he couldn't hear her speaking it reassured him the tiniest bit that she'd be alright. Blood marred every inch of his uniform but he felt no pain and no physical resistance as he began to navigate through the rubble. Citizens clutching candles to their chests in various states of melt all moved raptly out of his way as he walked slowly and resolutely through the piles of broken marble, past the fallen chandelier, and out the doors of the bank. With her he descended the stone steps of Jump City Bank into the periwinkle night, where the sky in the east was only just beginning to lighten with the promise of morning.

* * *

 _continue in part ix . . ._

* * *

Okay, a few words:

This chapter was a BEHEMOTH. A real doozy. This took weeks to write and I am dooone. Not 100% happy with it but whatevs, I got the point across. Such is life.

(Also, if you're still in the dark about what's going on here at the end of the chapter, the next one will clear up any remaining questions.)

Finally I delivered with the translation of the song. I want you guys to know that I literally wrote a song for this dumb story. It's not just a poem, it's a song with a melody. I work too hard ugh. Haha. IDK, it was fun anyway. I may not actually speak Swahili but I've studied music for over a decade and I do have an (at least basic level) understanding of African music.

And hey, I never ask this because I just don't like to have to ask, but I will this time. If you've read this far, please review? I need to know how you guys feel about what just happened haha. I've been waiting to drop this bomb since the beginning of this story and I really need to know how it went over. SO HOW DO YOU FEEL GUYS?

Lastly, there's a whole fuck ton of symbolism and extra goodies here. I think I might talk about them all a bit at the end of the next and final chapter, just for fun, so look out for that. :)

Thanks for reading and see you then!

Next chapter: _sunshine_


	9. sunshine

This is the final chapter. Enjoy! Lost of happy to make up for the sad. This clocks in at the longest chapter BY FAR and of course it's the fluffy one. I really mean it when I say ENJOY haha. Enjoy the fuck out of this chapter.

* * *

 _part ix_ _ㅡ_ _sunshine_

* * *

Everything in the med bay was sharp. The arm of the chair was hard and clammy, the glowing monitor display crisp and bright, each clean wrinkle of the sheets draped over Raven's legs distinct. The cloudless morning sky outside painted a psychedelic blend of egg yolk in watercolor on the window, casting a few sunbeams on the far wall by the neon EXIT sign. It was ten to seven and each tick of the clock entered Beast Boy's ears with clarity. It was all so… there.

It felt like waking up from a year long coma. He couldn't believe he and Raven had only been out for one night.

But that's what they said. The plastic seat cover creaked as he looked over at Cyborg, Starfire, and Robin, who'd been huddled by the door for five minutes now, leaving Beast Boy alone at Raven's bedside. It was alright with him. Over the last two hours he must have assured them "yes, I'm fine" at least four dozen times. A moment of silence was bliss.

And he _was_ fine. One hand subconsciously brushed his stomach again, feeling the ragged fabric there where his suit had been torn to shreds. But the skin underneath was intact. Rough and scarred but fully healed. He felt nothing. No stinging, no aching, no phantom pain. Raven had truly and fully saved his life.

"Thanks," he heard Robin say. "Trust me, it's for the best. I promise I'll wake you as soon as anything changes."

The door clicked open, drawing Beast Boy's attention. Starfire gave him a small subdued wave and disappeared out the door after Cyborg.

Robin answered the question in Beast Boy's eyes. "They're gonna get some sleep. None of us have slept since yesterday and this ordeal has been all over the news. Someone has to be rested in case a villain tries to take advantage of the situation."

"Right. Good call."

"Beast Boy, can we talk in the hall for a second?"

His tone reeked of barely concealed eagerness that made Beast Boy sigh. He gave Raven a quick once-over, even though he knew nothing had changed. Her lips moved soundlessly over the shape of her mantra, her body hovering an inch or so above the topsheet. Slowly but surely the injury had shrunk and closed, though he was sure she was going to have a scar as prominent as his. Twenty or so minutes ago Cyborg had dropped the clipboard on the counter with a triumphant clatter and proclaimed Raven was as good as new, and now all that was left was for her to wake from the healing trance. The waiting was terrible.

Reluctantly he scooted his chair out and followed Robin from the med bay.

"I know what you're gonna say," he spilled, the second Robin closed the door behind them, unable to wait for whatever lecture Robin had planned, "and I'm so sorry. I know I messed up bad and I lost my cool and it was almost fatal and Raven got dragged into it and hurt and I never wanted that and I know she's gonna be okay but it's still all my fault, I shouldn't have lost control like that, Red X was trying to rile me up, he knew exactly which buttons to press, so I understand if you want to put me on probation orㅡ"

"Wait, slow down." Concern crossed his face and he brought one hand up to Beast Boy's shoulder, effectively corking the remainder of his rant. "I wasn't gonna say any of that, Beast Boy. I was gonna ask if you were okay."

He resisted the urge to throw his head back and groan. "You already askedㅡ"

"And I'm asking again," Robin said carefully, "now that we're alone. Just between us. I'm not asking if you're healed, I'm asking if you're _okay_."

"What? Oh." Beast Boy's irritation evaporated. "I guess. Yeah. I dunno. Yeah."

Robin crossed his arms, unconvinced. "Do you understand exactly what happened? We're all so confused. What exactly did Raven do to save you?"

Beast Boy opened his mouth to answer but was thrown off by the intense onslaught of deja vu. They'd had this conversation before. Of course they hadn't, not really, but it felt like all of this had already happened. But it was all in his head. And Raven's. What a mess.

"Well," he started. He gestured noncommittally with his hands, hoping Robin would catch the drift. He didn't, judging by the blatant bafflement on his face. Beast Boy groaned and began to explain the concept of Raven's shared healing trance. But he gave up halfway through, resorting to, "It's complicated. Rae… she's more powerful than I thought she was, heh. And I already had kind of a lofty opinion to begin with."

That amused Robin. "Yeah, I know."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Robin quipped back but Beast Boy didn't hear what he said. There was a sudden spark of awareness that drew his attention like geomagnetism. Through the wall. He didn't see or hear anything but he'd felt something. He didn't know what it was. It was a sense he didn't have. Like some color he'd never seen before.

 _Beast Boy?_ Robin was calling him from a world away but he was focused on the spark. It was as plain as gravity.

"She's awake."

"What?"

"Raven's awake." He didn't know how he knew, he just knew, and when he burst back through the door into the med bay there she was, sitting up, hands folded in her lap. There were circles under her eyes and her hair was a bit frazzled, her skin still stained red in spots, but she looked otherwise healthy and unharmed. She gave him a weary smile that crinkled her eyes at the corners and his heart tried to restart itself. "Hey," he offered.

"Hey," she returned, pushing her tangled hair away from her eyes.

Without taking his eyes off her he said, "Rob, you wanna spread the word thatㅡ" but the door clicked softly shut and he saw that Robin had already left. "So…" He reclaimed the chair he'd lived in for the last couple hours by her bed, nervous yet oddly calm. "I have to ask. This is… real, now. Right? We're really here? This is happening?"

The small smile came back. God he loved that smile. She knew so well how to hide it that whenever it snuck out it meant she wasn't merely happy, she was uncontrollably ecstatic. Two smiles in two minutes. Raven was on cloud nine. "Yes," she said, amusement coloring her tone. "This is real."

He sighed audibly. "Good. I mean, I thought so, but y'know, after what happened. How did you know about the lighthouse?" Raven fiddled with the sheets, not answering. He pressed her. "After you collapsed you said 'there's a lighthouse on the shore.' That's what my dad used to say, after _kisiwa chiriku._ I'd get upset because the birds were lost and he'd always say 'it's alright, there's a lighthouse on the shore.' How did you know?"

"I don't know. I just knew." She resigned herself to staring at his knees. "That's not weird, is it?"

He thought about the spark that had told him she was awake. How he'd just known. They were gonna have to talk about _that_ eventually. "No," he countered, avoiding the topic for now, "not any weirder than anything else that's happened since yesterday."

"What else do you remember?" she prompted cautiously.

He eyed her, wondering how to break it gently and instead deciding to just go all in. "Rae, I remember everything."

"Oh." Blood rushed to her face and she broke the eye contact.

"Listen." Gently, tentatively, he brushed his fingers on her hand. When she didn't protest he laced their fingers, ever so slightly, steeling himself for what he was about to say. "I don't want you to feel like you have to… I mean, I understand why you never told me. I'm not that obtuse. I know why. And if you want, we can go back to exactly how it was before and pretend none of this ever happened. Not that I want that," he added numbly. He did not fucking want that. "But if it's what you need then it's what I'll do."

She breathed deeply and her fingers closed around his, just a bit. She whispered something to herself then said louder, "Beast Boy." She thought for a moment then amended it, saying with an air of formal practicality, "Garfield." His heart skipped again but she gave him no time to linger on the affectionate gesture. "When I was sent to train with Azar it was because the alternative to total control over my emotions did not bear imagining. You know how it is when I lose control, even by the tiniest slip. It's chaos. If you had died at the bank I don't know what would have happened. I could have destroyed the entire building and everyone inside. I could have destroyed the entire city without even knowing it was happening. That's the exact type of situation Azar taught me to subvert. I never should have gotten close enough to anyone that I felt their death like it was my own."

"You weren't supposed to make friends?"

"No. I wasn't. But…" She paused for a moment, looking at their hands. "I did. Can't change that. It's done."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying it's done. Nothing I do now or ever will change the way I feel about the people I know. If you died tomorrow or in fifty years I think the outcome would be the same and it wouldn't matter if I started now and never spoke to you again. It would hurt just the same."

"Alright, I'll say it. You are sending really mixed signals right now. Can you just come out with it?"

Raven rolled her eyes. "I'm trying to say no. No, I don't want to pretend that none of this happened. What's the point? It won't save us in the future by pretending now. So let's just be."

Beast Boy felt like he could breakdance. How could she sound so solemn about something so amazing? "Your words are sad but all I'm hearing is a big hell yeah. You're talking about it like it's the end of the world! Rae, today I got to tell Red X to fuck off like six times (once while he was sitting in the back of a squad car with two Robin-shaped black eyes), you and I gave death the middle finger, and I found out you love me back. There is literally nothing you can say to make this sad for me."

The creaking door cut off Raven's reply and a couple tentative knocks announced the return of their tired friends. All three were obviously bursting to come in but were waiting for some kind of invitation, so Beast Boy waved them forward, surreptitiously disentangling his hand from Raven's.

Star descended on her with borderline psychotic hugs, lots of tears, and exactly the same decibel of shrieking with which she'd gifted Beast Boy a couple hours ago.

"So you are both better now?" Starfire cried as Raven awkwardly patted her back, slightly crushed under the taller girl's weight.

"Yeah," Raven assured her, "we're great." Cyborg pried Starfire away so Raven could stand and stretch. "I'm really eager to get out of the med bay, though, and _no_ , Cyborg, I'm not signing any med papers."

Cyborg reeled. "You think I'd make you fill out a bunch of forms right now? I'm offended!" He stole the next hug, ignoring her discomfort for just a moment and then letting her escape. "You can fill them out later after you'veㅡ"

"Bye."

Star wilted. "Where are you going?"

"Shower. And…" She wrinkled her nose at Beast Boy. "You need to shower too."

Beast Boy pulled a face, acting appalled at the accusation. "Blood drenched clothing is all the rage right now I'll have you know aaaand she's gone. So." He changed gears, rounding on the others with the intensity of a hyperactive puppy. "I was thinking we should celebrate! What do you guys think? We could order Chinese. I know they said they wouldn't deliver again after last time but I _really_ want a fortune cookie right now. Any chance the driver would pick up balloons on the way if I bribed them?"

"You're in a strangely good mood," Cyborg noted.

" _Duh."_ He waved his arms around, puzzled about the lingering moroseness of his teammates. "Hello, I just did a triple cartwheel around the grim reaper. What is everyone not understanding about this?"

"No, you're right." To everyone's surprise, it was Robin who said it. "We should celebrate. I'm still not sure exactly what happened back there, and while I think it's important, I also think we can get to it later. A celebration is in order. But we should go out instead of staying here. We got a lot of really crazy press coverage last night, especially with the candlelight vigil as you guys were…" he trailed off, unsure how to phrase it. "Well, at any rate, I think it's wise to show the public that you and Raven weren't down for long and you've both bounced back."

Beast Boy pointed at him accusatively. "This is just PR for you."

But Cy and Star had already latched onto the idea. "I vote we do the hanging in the park," Starfire asserted merrily. "After the stressful evening I would love nothing more than to just do the relaxation with my friends in the sun."

The thought of lying in the sun with his friends was rather enticing. "Yeah, I could go for that," Beast Boy agreed. "Let's do it. But you guys owe me a fortune cookie."

After his shower, Beast Boy lingered in his room for longer than he meant to. The scattered comic books and dirty clothes mocked him from the carpet. He couldn't believe he had _dreamt_ that he'd cleaned this place. Digging through his dresser for a clean t-shirt, he shook his head in resentful disbelief. He was going to have to clean it all over again if he ever wanted Raven in here.

That unbidden thought brought yet another flutter to his chest.

He sat at the edge of his bed to tie his shoes, trying not to think about Raven, in here, laying in this very spot. He shook his head. He shook it again. A teardrop of pink lava detached from the top of his bedside lava lamp and fell into the light, turning his entire bedroom orange for a second. He reached over and clicked it off. He was glad it wasn't really broken.

When Raven came into the common room her hair was still damp. Beast Boy watched her from his place on the couch, letting everyone else do the job of convincing her to go to the park with them. To his surprise she agreed readily. Cyborg high fived Starfire, and the two resumed loading what looked like every single condiment from the fridge door into an ice-packed cooler. Raven slipped away, crossing the room to hover behind the couch near Beast Boy.

"It still feels like a dream," she murmured, just loudly enough for him to hear. "Doesn't it?"

"Yeah." He leaned his head back over the couch cushion so that he was looking at her upside down. "But it _is_ real, right?"

"Yes." She looked toward the window at the twitter of a passing bird. "At least, I'm pretty sure." They shared a nervous glance.

"Alright," Cyborg announced in a booming voice. "If everyone's ready then let's go! I've got the T-car idling down by the tunnel! Let's gooo!"

Raven gave him a hesitant look and a sudden wave of reluctance washed over him. It came so quickly that he sat up, reevaluating her from right-side up. That couldn't be right. He wanted to go. He wanted nothing more than to go. Did… did that feeling come from her? "You guys go on ahead," he said slowly. "Me and Rae are gonna fly there."

"You want to fly?" Robin tucked a catcher's mitt under his arm and frowned with skepticism. "Are you sure that's a good idea?"

"Yeah, we're fine!" Beast Boy said for the thousandth time that morning. "A little stiff, though, what with all the stabbing."

"Beast Boy!" Raven whacked him on the back of the head. Turning back to Robin with a sort of exasperated stoicism, she said, "It's fine, honestly. He's right. We need to stretch, it would do us good."

Robin reluctantly agreed, and the three of them left, Cy hitting Beast Boy with an unreadable look as the elevator closed. As soon as they were gone Beast Boy rolled over the backside of the couch and looked at Raven expectantly.

Her lips pressed into a grim line. "While I was in the shower I remembered something."

"Uh oh."

"No, it's nothing bad. I just… it's embarrassing. But if we're going to, um. If we're going to be…"

Beast Boy almost laughed when he placed his finger on the source of her panic. She was struggling to find a label for their relationship. God, if that was the hardest part about this for her then it was gonna be an absolute breeze. He bit his lip to hide the snicker. "Skip that part for now," he suggested.

She breathed a sigh of relief. "If we're going to become involved," she went on, "then I want to set the precedent for honesty."

"Um yeah, okay. That sounds good." He hoped he sounded like he was following because he was super lost.

"I remembered where I got the idea to merge our mindscapes. You know how I was trying to remember that the whole time we were in the trance together? Well, I've remembered."

"Yeah?" He inched closer subconsciously as curiosity consumed him.

"It didn't come from a book at all," she mumbled, "or from anywhere. It was my idea. It was a dumb question, really. I was only eight years old at the time. It came up when Azar was teaching me about the self-induced meditative state. I asked him if it was possible to share the state with someone in order to heal them."

"So he taught you toㅡ"

"No." Raven let her hair fall into her face, indicating that this was the embarrassing part. He fell quiet. "He said it was impossible because it would require an emotional symbiosis of the deepest kind, which was completely at odds with what he was teaching me."

"But you did it. How did you know it would work?"

"I suppose I didn't."

Frustration drove him to scowl at her. "That was stupid. You had no idea what would happen! You could have died too for all you know!"

"Possible." She turned away.

All the fight blew out of him. He considered every retort, every road in this argument, and ultimately decided to shut his mouth. Raven was right. What was done was done, and he shouldn't be rewarding her show of rare open honesty with hostility. So he backtracked with a deep sigh and pulled her into a hug. At first she tensed with surprise, but slowly she relaxed and when he buried his face in her hair her arms finally found their way around him too. "Thanks," he said. "I would have done the same for you."

Raven tried to pull away. "Okay, now you're just being cheesy. We should go meet the others or they'll think we ran into trouble."

But he didn't let her go. "Just one more thing. I was trying to do this when you collapsed on me, not that that was your fault or anything," he added hastily, cheeks growing ever redder, "but I have to do it before I lose my nerve or I'll probably neverㅡ" Raven pressed a finger to his lips with sarcastic impatience. Floating up just an inch, her eyes fluttered shut and their lips met, just for a second.

She pulled away, eyes still shut, like she was too scared to even open them. She mumbled almost imperceptibly. "Please tell me that was what you were talking about."

He grinned like the idiot in love that he was and pulled her to his chest so sharply that she squeaked. Instead of answering he kissed her again. This time he was ready and he meant it. He poured everything he'd never said into it and he swore he could feel her heart beating, pulsing in a drumbeat that ignited his veins. When he paused to breathe he still couldn't pull away, and nudged her cheek with his nose as he posed an interesting observation. "Nothing broke."

Raven glanced around the room with quiet surprise, as if she'd been sure they were standing in ruins and was about to say so. He soaked in her curiosity and wondered, not for the first time, if there were any lasting effects from the connection Raven had wrought between them.

"Okay," he said brightly, yanking her from her reverie, "let's go!"

She followed him to the nearest window in a daze and he threw it open wide. "By the way," he said sneakily. "I'm a vegan so I don't do 'cheesy.' If you must insult me then please respectfully stick to 'corny.'"

That brought her back to earth. She gave him a withering look and said, "You'll be chopped liver if you don't shut it."

He only snickered and transformed into a blue bird.

They arrived at the park and awkwardly smiled for a photographer that quickly excused herself from the sidelines of the baseball game that was currently under way. The other Titans had taken up a game with a couple of local college kids, judging by their hats and shirts all sporting the blue and gold JCU logo. One of them was playing umpire and called a timeout as soon as he saw the photographer snapping photos of Raven and and Beast Boy.

Cyborg jogged over from third base with a brilliant, slap-happy grin plastered on his face. "You guys sure took your time." Beast Boy glared, unsure of the accusation, but was distracted by Starfire's sudden gasp.

"Raven, you did not bring a book! Do you plan on engaging in the summer fun?"

Raven looked down at her hands like she expected to see a book there. "I forgot it. But I don't feel up to baseball right now. Maybe next time."

Everyone's jaw dropped, including Beast Boy's. Never in the history of park adventures had Raven ever given any inkling she would join in a recreational athletic activity of her own free will. Star squealed her delight. "I will do the holding of you to your word! Beast Boy?"

"Pass," he said automatically, still reeling over Raven's odd demeanor. "I'll be commentator."

As everyone retook their spots in the grass Beast Boy followed Raven as she made her way to the blankets that had been spread out in the shade of a towering oak. Back the way they'd come, the photographer peaked out from behind a tree, the sun glinting off her camera lens. Beast Boy pointed her out to Raven, who simply shrugged her indifference.

He was about to ask Raven if she was serious about playing baseball next time when he noticed Robin making his way over to them.

"What, you're not gonna play?" Beast Boy asked him.

"I'm not up to bat yet." He took a seat next to Raven, wiping his forehead and taking a swig of his water. "I thought it was a good time to talk to you guys about what happened. Specifically," he emphasized, looking at Raven, "about what you did."

Raven averted his gaze, fidgeting uncomfortably between the two boys. "You didn't explain?" she asked Beast Boy.

"I tried." He grimaced, thinking he probably could have done a better job of it. "Honestly, I wasn't sure what to say."

Robin cut in. "Look, you don't have to be specific. The whole ordeal was traumatic and I don't want to relive it in detail any more than you do. I only ask because it's important for the team that I know what each of us is capable of. Raven, we had no _idea_ your healing powers were so advanced." Awe leaked into his voice and Beast Boy felt Raven cringe away from it.

She shook her head. "I don't want you to get the wrong idea. I'm not a miracle worker."

"I didn't say that. But you _did_ kind of pull off a miracle. We thought…" He looked at Beast Boy with an intense sadness that he quickly shook off. "We thought the worst. What you did was absolutely incredible."

"Yes," she admitted, "I suppose it was. But it's not an ability we can rely on as a team. I don't want any of you putting yourselves in extra danger because you think I can pull you back from the brink of death."

"Of course not," he agreed. "Especially if healing the damage is harmful to you, as it obviously was. I only meant in the most extreme, most unforeseen circumstances. Situations like last night at the bank. But you're saying you don't think you'll be able to do it again? Was it a one time thing?"

Raven dithered. "Not exactly. It would probably work again."

"But you just saidㅡ"

"If it was still Beast Boy I was healing. Let me finish, would you? This is hard enough as it is." She spat out the rest of it in one breath, burying her head in her hands at the end. "I'm just trying to say that the shared trance isn't likely to work with anyone other than Beast Boy. Okay?" The 'okay' was smothered by her hands.

Robin looked lost as he tried to identify the cause of her sudden outburst. "I don't get it. Did you forge some new kind of azarathian mental connection you've never mentioned?"

"Jeez, Rob, you're torturing her." He had his suspicions that Robin might have hit the nail right on the head with that assessment, but he also knew that's not what Raven meant. "She's not talking about some obscure magical connection, okay? Just a regular old fashioned human one."

Confusion still dominated their leader's face. "I don't…"

"Come on," Beast Boy joked, "you know this one. Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme…" he trailed off, pointing first to Raven, then to himself. Raven saw this and took her hands away from her face to shove Beast Boy over into the grass.

Comprehension slapped Robin in the face. "Wha- oh. _Oh._ Really?"

"Believe it or not," Raven groaned, sounding like she'd rather not believe it herself.

"We decided to tell you on the way over here," Beast Boy went on, all jokes aside, "since you're team leader and all, but we want to keep it on the DL for as long as we can. You know how it is. Especially for her." He pointed a thumb at Raven, who had just retreated underneath her hood. "Hey uhh… are you gonna say anything?" he prodded. "You look shocked."

He looked almost more giddy than shocked. "No," he said, "actually more like relieved. I thought we were gonna have another apocalypse on our hands when you guys finally looked at a newspaper."

"What?" Raven perked up. "Why?"

Robin pointed out the photographer, who'd taken up residence under the ramada with a family that was having a cookout, pretending like she wasn't watching them. "I'll give you _one_ guess how the media has been spinning this disaster," Robin told them smugly.

One of the college girls shouted at Robin from second base. "Hey Robin, you're up to bat!"

"Coming!" He jumped up agilely, but hesitated, looking back at them with a fleeting look of uncharacteristic sentimentality. "You know," he said quietly, "I always thought you two would be good for each other." His face grew hard. "Prove me right." And he was off to bat amidst cheers and taunts.

"So what are we gonna do about _that?_ " Raven pondered miserably as the photographer snuck closer to duck behind a flowering hedge.

"I dunno. Seems kinda like a lost cause. I mean… I wasn't gonna mention it but there were a lot of people there when we first woke up. I was pretty distraught. I could have said anything."

Raven frowned. "We could always just deny it."

Beast Boy bit his lip. "Aaand I might have literally carried you out of the bank. They were trying to put you on a stretcher but I wouldn't let anyone near you. I carried you down the steps in my arms, all the way back to the car."

Raven sighed. "Good job."

"I wasn't thinking about how it looked," he snapped back.

"So much for 'on the downlow.'"

Beast Boy shrugged. "Well, the bubble was good while it lasted."

"The whole half a day," Raven sassed.

"Let's just cut our losses. You wanna pop it with a bang?"

Raven narrowed her eyes. "What exactly are you suggesting?"

He matched her suspicion with unrelenting mischief. "I'm suggesting we make the front page two days in a row."

Raven blinked in the slowest, most disparaging way possible. "Oh, I don't know. Why not."

"Really?"

"I'm gonna regret it, but sure. I'm in a good mood. Do what you want, whatever it is."

"It's this." He leapt to his feet. "Oi!" He waved frantically at the photographer, who was currently trying to snap a photo from behind the hedge. "You!" The lanky girl stood up, glancing this way and that before resigning herself to the fact that Beast Boy was talking to her. "Yes, you!" he affirmed. "Come'ere!"

The photographer slunk over to their oak tree, looking thoroughly contrite.

"It's okay," Beast Boy said cheerily. "I don't bite. Haha. Get it? No?"

"I'm Natalie!" the photographer blurted, smoothing her pencil skirt. "I'm really, really sorry for spying. Just trying to make a living. Honestly I'm glad you guys are okay, I was at the candlelight vigil all night long. Really I should have been candid but it's just that I'm working freelance and I'm under pressure for high interest pictures and well, you guys are the talk of the town right now. Anyway, I'm gonna sprint away before I put my foot any further into my mouth.

"Hang on," Beast Boy laughed, "not yet. Get your camera out, Natalie, because you're about to be in high demand."

"My camera is always out," Natalie scoffed. "Why?"

For years Beast Boy would keep the front page of the newspaper from that day tacked up on the corkboard in his room.

It would stay there through hundreds of cleaning sessions, through dozens of different homes, fading and yellowing and wrinkling until Starfire eventually framed it as a surprise for the Tamaranean friendship day one year. It would follow them everywhere, all from the moment Raven tacked it up there on that first night and looked over her shoulder at him with a certain shyness that she would never entirely overcome.

Warmth welled up inside him and he crossed his bedroom to hug her from behind, scanning the headline on the newspaper for the umpteenth time. _BEAUTY AND THE BEAST_ , it read, in big bold letters, and underneath was a full page spread of him kissing Raven in the shade of the oak tree. Over time he would eventually forget the headlines that announced his presumed death, or Raven's, from the day before. He made the papers hundreds of times over the course of his life, but the only headline he ever remembered word for word was the one above the picture in the park. Beauty and the Beast. It was a good headline.

Hesitantly, he wrapped his arms around her waist, savoring this moment as they both looked at the paper on his corkboard. He was sure that on the last day of his life he would be able to recall these few seconds with absolute clarity. For the first time since waking up at the bank, it didn't feel at all like a dream.

"I admit it," Raven said softly, her hand resting on his wrist. "This is nice. This is going to be nice."

"Hell yeah!" he whooped, distracted by something new. He pointed avidly at the tiny weather strip just below the headline. It read sunny, sunny, sunny, every day this week. A smallprint quote from the local weather station noted " _Nothing but sunshine, every day."_

"That'll be nice too," Raven agreed. "I'm tired of rain."

"It never actually rained, though." He pulled her hair behind her ear so he could see her face. "Remember?"

"Just because it wasn't real doesn't mean it didn't happen."

"Cryptic."

But as she turned to face him he realized he knew exactly what she meant. He thought of the endless sunlit savannah he had turned away from to come back to life with her, of the sunrays that had rent apart the imagined ballroom floor like an earthquake as she opened her heart to him and he smiled. It happened. It was still happening. It would happen forever and ever, again and again, as long as he lived.

* * *

 _Nothing but sunshine, every day._

* * *

The end!

This has been an adventure and a half. This was super fun to write. It was a real puzzle at times to work out how to write certain parts so I feel it's really helped me develop, almost more than any other story. Really rewarding to complete. When this idea started I never intended to actually write it, but as with most ideas it grew a mind of its own. Hope everyone who read this far enjoyed it. Lots of fluff in this chapter to make up for all the heart wrenching angst. I KNOW y'all enjoyed that, haha.

I hope everyone got their answers about the previous chapter from this last you still have questions, hit me up! It's important, as a writer, that I hear about it when the point didn't quite come across. This story was pretty abstract. I know I said I might talk a bit about the symbolism throughout the story at the end of this chapter but there was honest to god a real fuckton of it and I suspect no one really cares all that much haha. If anyone expresses interest I'll post an author's note about it, but otherwise I'm just gonna go ahead and sign off on this story.

Love you guys! Thanks for reading.

xoxo


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